Last year, 270 transportation experts attended the first-ever Innovation in Mobility Public Policy Summit in San Francisco, and Susan Shaheen was one of the key visionaries of that event.
Shaheen’s idea was to “bring the silos of shared use together,” with the philosophy that the sum of all the carpool and ridesharing companies, government transportation agencies, and marketing and research experts would be better than working independently.
Kicking off this year’s summit at Washington D.C.’s downtown Hamilton Crowne Plaza, Shaheen, the co-director of the University of California Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, spoke on a panel called “Setting the Stage – What’s New in Shared-Use Mobility?”
“We need good public-policy decisions. We need to generate a means of raising revenue and capital. We need to move from making this a climate-change issue to making this a business and job-growth issue,” Shaheen told the crowd.
Sharon Feigon, executive director of The Shared-Use Mobility Center, moderated the panel discussion and noted that the transportation sharing economy is an industry exploding in growth.
“Twelve years ago, when I got involved in car-sharing, no one thought it would work. Now even rental-car companies and automobile companies are getting involved,” Feigon said, adding that some of the best tools to use in the quest for better communities included carpooling; companies that offer taxi-like rides such as Uber, Sidecar, and Lyft; and bikesharing.
Evident from this “rock star panel,” as Feigon called it, the overriding theme is not some kind of anti-car agenda but rather simply a world with better options and fewer traffic jams and congestion. Shaheen, for example, noted that each car-sharing car takes nine to 13 vehicles off the street.
Panelist Gabe Klein reminded attendees, who are often buried deep in the day-to-day of transportation planning, that “people just want to get from point A to point B. They don’t care whether it’s a bike or a bus. Is it really surprising Uber has been able to do what they do ?
“A lot of people don’t know that Capital Bikeshare is a government project. There are blurred lines between the private and public sectors,” said Klein, a senior visiting fellow at the Urban Land Institute, formerly of Zipcar DC and the Washington D.C. and Chicago departments of transportation, and a bike-infrastructure guru.
Klein laid out some of the most important issues to focus upon:
- Bike lanes are really important and bikeshare is equally important.
- Marketing and branding is crucial, like in Chicago, where people really feel like the bikeshare system is theirs.
- Access is more important than ownership, and
- The public and private sectors have to find ways to work together to make more active-transportation spaces.
John Martin of the Southeastern Institute of Research and Generations Matter think tank offered “seven trends that will take shared-use mobility mainstream.” In short:
- Technology is making it easy to sharing offline assets. There are even neighborhoods now that use an app for something as innocuous as sharing sugar.
- Millennials are driving much less and are not even getting their driver’s licenses. A car used to be a mobile party unit, but Millennials were raised differently and they’re wired differently because they’ve heard that they are all special. They feel they’ve been raised to do something remarkable and they want to make it happen. While Gen Xers are tech savvy, Millennials are tech dependent and hyper connected – and they want walkable communities and they’re building such a world.
- In the future, the senior population will double. Currently, one in seven drivers is over the age of 65. It will be four in seven in the future, which will create “bumper cars” on the road. Something different has to be done.
- The sharing economy saves people a lot of money. The recession unexpectedly smacked us, and now people are more frugal. Half of the need to be frugal comes in the two most expensive parts of family budgets: 34 percent of paychecks go to housing and 16 percent to transportation.
- Car manufacturers and executives get it. Martin works with them and they don’t say they’re in the “car business,” they say they’re in the “mobility business.”
- C-class executives and developers get it that the return on investment for transit-oriented development is huge.
- Fifty-one percent of MIllennials want public transportation, and even more want to be able to bike and walk in their neighborhoods.
Martin concluded, “Put your seat belts on, shared-use mobility is here to stay, and will grow exponentially.”
Photo of Gabe Klein by DDOT DC