Research projects

Shared mobility services like car sharing, bike sharing or e-scooter sharing have increasingly been introduced in cities across Europe. In combination with sustainable means of transport like walking, cycling and the public transport, they have the potential to reduce car-dependency in everyday life. In the context of 15-minute City concepts, shared mobility services can be able to offer people better accessible and flexible inter- and multi-modal connections for their journeys. However, their current distribution is far from being equally available across and within cities, as market-led operations tend to focus services on central locations or on knowledge-intensive areas (e.g., business parks and higher education campuses) in the outskirts of cities. Therefore, the emergence of shared mobility services can potentially both reinforce and weaken transport justice i.e., the provision of adequate transport and access to services for everyone and the mitigation of corresponding social disparities.

Our project Share4Equity aims to explore the current and potential contributions of shared mobility services to help realise the ideas of equitable transport, mobility justice and the 15-minute City. Transport justice is used as the core framework for examining how opportunities for different formats of shared mobility are supplied and perceived across society. Three dimensions of transport justice (distributive, procedural and epistemic) will be used to analyse: 1) the supply and distribution of shared mobility services, 2) user perceptions and experiences, and 3) the inclusivity of different forms of sharing, including community-based informal options. Our research develops a set of empirical toolboxes combining quantitative and qualitative methods such as spatial modelling, household surveys, back-casting and co-creative workshops, and a testbed approach. The present project employs a comparative transnational approach, including case studies from European countries (Germany, Sweden, Italy and Poland) and from Canada. In collaboration with cities, service providers and civic society, the project will develop a justice-oriented toolkit consisting of guidelines and measures for evaluating local mobility policies and practices to further sustainable shared mobility services within the 15-minute City concept.