WASHINGTON — If combined with public transit and increased in scale, shared modes of transportation, such as ride-hailing, scooter sharing, and bike sharing, can enhance mobility, equity, and sustainability in metropolitan areas, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Cities, transit agencies, and shared mobility providers should collaborate in goal-setting, experimentation, testing, and implementation.

The Role of Transit, Shared Modes, and Public Policy in the New Mobility Landscape recommends deliberate and strategic measures in order to realize the full and potentially transformative benefits of shared services. These measures include providing travelers with real-time or near real-time information on combinations of available price and service offerings, smartphone applications that simplify the process of arranging and paying for the use of multiple transportation modes for a single trip, and more public sector coordination of services across modes and jurisdictions. The report recommends steps to help bring about this transformation, starting in urban cores with historically robust transit service but also with the aim of increasing the value and viability of transit and shared mobility services more broadly across regions.

“Both shared modes and public transit have been severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Gary C. Thomas, recently retired president and CEO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit and chair of the committee that wrote the report.  “However, both should resume their potential to serve consumers and society as the country recovers.”

The report highlights some significant barriers to achieving increasingly integrated transportation services, such as the need to systematically gather and share information on the service offerings and real-time performance of shared mode options, particularly from the private ride-hailing companies that provide the majority of shared mode trips. Fragmented local governance can limit the public sector’s ability to overcome these obstacles and to put in place regional strategies for service integration. Other significant barriers include policies that underprice road use when accounting for the effects of congestion and emissions; the lack of integrated fares, routes, and schedules across multiple transit providers regionally; and the challenge of keeping pace with and coordinating new and rapidly evolving shared mobility services.

Overcoming these barriers will be vital to shaping the changing transportation landscape in ways that better serve the public interest as well as individual travelers. The report recommends the creation of publicly available software platforms that integrate and offer information from all service providers to consumers about regional transportation options, including their cost, duration, and emission impacts. Changes in laws may be needed to enable and ensure more comprehensive reporting of service offerings while protecting consumer privacy and proprietary information.

Appropriate pricing will be key to ensuring that shared modes, when integrated with transit, enhance mobility, efficiency, equity, and sustainability, the report says. Expanding shared mobility options to serve lower-income neighborhoods that have limited transit service and providing subsidies to riders and operators can greatly improve access to mobility and equity for all parts of the population. Dynamic pricing structures, such as congestion pricing, may also improve the performance of all road-based transportation, including road-based transit.

All entities involved in these measures, both public and private, should pilot test, evaluate, and share best practices, the report says. Public sector research agencies, specifically, can serve urban areas by supporting such testing and evaluation as well as research. Many of these testing, implementation, and evaluation measures can be most readily adopted by central cities in a metropolitan area, but should expand to more completely include suburban areas over time. Each region will have to find its own governance solutions given the great disparity of how governments are organized across the country, but regional planning organizations can help facilitate this process.

The study — undertaken by the Committee on the Role of Public Transportation and Mobility Management in an Era of New and Expanding Shared Mobility — was sponsored by the Transportation Research Board Executive Committee. The National Academies are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

Contact:
Andrew Robinson, Media Relations Associate
Office of News and Public Information
202-334-2138; news@nas.edu