Our Women in Mobility series continues, as does the insight! This past month, we spoke with three knowledgable women working in shared mobility to discuss the future of shared mobility, why it’s so important for our cities and communities, and how we can make people adopt it into their lifestyles. Find out what they had to say.
september EDITION OF WOMEN IN SHARED MOBILITY: OUR INTERVIEWEES
Monica Araya, vice president of costa rica’s association of electric mobility
1. How will shared mobility change in the next 5 years?
Mobility will change because our transportation systems are broken, especially in developing countries. Because for too many people, bad transport has become a matter of life and death the pressure on new urban solutions is unprecedented. I don’t remember a pressure for change like the one I see now. We experience the worst pollution and congestion in the developing countries and the power of necessity is triggering a new supply of shared and electric options to respond to the growing demand for change. Shared mobility schemes in Europe and North America are opening people’s minds elsewhere. Clearly, the scale of our shared mobility schemes, in my country and Latin America, will be modest in the next 5 years but the qualitative change will make a difference: people will discover that new solutions do exist.
2. Why is shared mobility important for our cities and communities?
Shared mobility is about empowering people who are let down by the collapsing transport systems. In our countries the offering of shared, electric options will help people move beyond complaining on Facebook. They will have something concrete to be inspired by and fight for. Shared mobility is disruptive and will face opposition so these schemes will be stronger if they help created innovative and interactive networks of users so that they stand up for these services. Building the constituency of shared, electric mobility users is essential for these schemes to survive in the long term.
3. What do we have to do to convince more people to make shared mobility part of their lifestyle?
When working with people we are firm but patient. Lifestyles and cities have been built around the internal combustion engine and, let’s face in Latin America, cars are a cultural symbol of success (because it means breaking free from the tyranny of bad public transit). Using an “anti-car” narrative to lecture people will only get people on the defensive. So we must work on our own persuasion psychologies: “To See It is To Believe It”. “Give this a try, it’s fun”. Offer people an experience they will love and crave. Shared mobility will be the preferred choice when people realize firsthand the advantages of riding in a city with shared electric vehicles. For us in developing countries a new cultural frontier is to turn this mobility into a new great aspiration not an obligation.
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Monica Araya leads Costa Rica Limpia, a citizen-strategy group promoting zero-emission, electric mobility. She is Vice President of Costa Rica’s Association of Electric Mobility. She has worked on sustainability for over 20 years and joined Homeward Bound as part of the world´s largest female expedition to Antarctica to promote women leadership in sustainability. Monica writes frequently in local and international media and is an active public speaker, her TED talk about fossil-free and electric mobility has been watched over one million times. Follow Monica on Twitter.
Sheila Struyck, Lablord of Europcar Lab
1. How will shared mobility change in the next 5 years?
We at Europcar believe that people are looking for an attractive alternative for car-ownership and really believe that the next five years will be a pivot where people finally realize that owning a car is becoming as luxurious as owning a horse (which was quite normal in 1900). You only use the car for 4% of the time. That is an expensive hobby…
2. Why is shared mobility important for our cities and communities?
Because we know for instance that 59% of people who use our carsharing service GoCar in Dublin, don’t own, nor want to own a car. One car in carsharing replaces 15 private owned cars..
3. What do we have to do to convince more people to make shared mobility part of their lifestyle?
Make owning a private car extremely expensive and inconvenient.
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Sheila Struyck is Lablord of Europcar Lab and Managing Director at BU New Mobility. Connect her on LinkedIN here.
Josipa G. Petrunic, Executive Director & CEO of Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium
1. How will shared mobility change in the next 5 years?
In general, mobility across North America and the developed world, in particular, will become increasingly low-carbon and “smart” enabled. “Low carbon” points to the fact propulsion systems will become increasingly electrified, through battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell electric propulsion systems with a concomitant “greenifying” of electricity grids away from coal towards natural gas generation towards hydro electric, wind, solar and potentially nuclear power. These efforts will be driven over the next decade by emissions regulations and vehicle production regulations (including, “corporate average fuel economy (CAFÉ)” standards in North America, for example), and only secondarily by consumer demand. Lower carbon mobility will also become increasingly “shared” in nature through public and private fleet system delivery as fleets gain intelligence that enables the optimization of on-demand solutions and the automization of traffic flow to support the efficient movement of people, goods and services. “Shared mobility” will tend to support the redesign of more densely populated cities over time that also enable “active” transportation, such as walking and cycling.
2. Why is shared mobility important for our cities and communities?
Two years ago, Paris Climate commitments by nation-states around the world made it evident that transportation accounts for a significant portion of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Transportation allied to individual passenger mobility constitutes a major portion of that total GHG footprint. As the gross domestic product (GDP) of developing countries rises and poorer populations become increasingly rich through globalized trade or other domestic development mechanisms, the consumption of individual passenger mobility goods – such as a cars – is set to rise as well. The planet’s climate is already strained by the inefficient consumption of highly polluting passenger cars across the developed world today. The rise of the Chinese economy, the growing influence of India’s economy, and the emergence of other developing nations in the 21st century constitutes an unavoidable global GHG variable. The result is that both developed and developing economies around the world must transition to “shared mobility” services to achieve a modicum of global climate stability.
The shift away from carbon-intensive personal transport towards carbon-reduced or zero-emissions shared mobility services will also support the productivity of nation-states globally. The “sharing” of mobility, either through public transit services or private shared mobility tools, such as ride-sharing and on-demand shared ride-hailing services, should help to reduce traffic congestion which affects the economy negatively already today. Congestion reduces productive labour time and eats into the productivity of a nation’s labour force overall. Reducing individualized travel and increasingly shared mobility services will help to reduce GHGs, improve labour productivity and ultimately help generate more liveable cities and suburban communities.
3. What do we have to do to convince more people to make shared mobility part of their lifestyle?
The best way to convince anyone to do anything is to make it the cheapest most convenient choice available to them.
Therefore, “shared mobility” and “low carbon smart mobility” must become cheaper, faster and more convenient than carbon-intensive personalized mobility or transportation technologies today. To “kill the car” – namely, the personal gasoline or diesel automobile — societies must take three steps:
1. Price carbon, whether through direct taxation or indirect carbon pricing markets;
2. Price road usage, whether through toll roads, dynamic kilometre-usage and road use fees, or high priced parking;
3. Improve the frequency, reliability and comfort of public transit services, which may include shared micro-mobility services for “first kilometre/last kilometre” (i.e. first-mile/last-mile) transportation.
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Josipa G. Petrunic is the Executive Director and CEO of Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC). Connect with her on LinkedIN here.
See our first series of women in shared mobility interview here.
After speaking to these women in shared mobility, we are very optimistic about the future of carsharing. Want to talk more? Contact us!
