One of the biggest challenges entering a market with a carsharing or any other shared mobility service is sound investment decision-making. To support this, we’ve been working very hard here at movmi for the past 6 months to create a Shared Mobility City Index. In November 2015, we wrote about the first findings of a shared mobility city index in Daimler’s Move-Forward journal.
Over the past months, we condensed these findings into a research paper format and further analyzed the data we found. We have submitted these findings to the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET) and are extremely exited that our first research publication on the proposal for the Shared Mobility City Index has been accepted by and is now available online here.
The research paper looks at 16 cities on the East Coast of North America. They had to have at least 100,000 inhabitants and at least one car share provider. We tried to find out which of the 16 selected cities was successful in attracting (and keeping!) shared mobility providers and which factors would be the secret ingredient for their success.
We looked initially at a set of 11 individual index measures, general data (demographics, geography, climate and city culture), shared mobility landscape (current shared mobility providers, public transit options, commuting patterns and driving culture), and political vision and goals (vision of the mayor, sustainability plan, bylaws/ tenders supporting shared mobility).
After initial analysis we refined and reduced these measures to four areas (Urban Density, Commuting Patterns, Sustainability Plan and Shared Mobility Services).
Benchmarking the cities along these set of index measures would give them ideas which areas could be improved if they want to attract more shared mobility providers. At the same time, it gives shared mobility providers an idea if a city is worth considering to invest for expansion of their service.
If you are interested in our findings or want to discuss more, please contact us here.