SHARE-North

SHARE-North Webinar: The Future of Shared Mobility

10 March 2022 - Published by Rebecca Karbaumer
On March 4th, the SHARE-North project held its final event of a ten part series of webinars on “How to Make Shared Mobility Rock”. If you missed the webinar, would like to view the recording or the presentations, you can catch up here.

Throughout the series, we covered everything from varieties of shared mobility and their impact, innovative and practical solutions for integrating shared mobility into Mobility Hubs, housing developments and businesses as well as target-group oriented communication strategies. With this final webinar, we looked to the future with the City of Bergen’s Lars Ove Kvalbein (NO) and Lund University’s Michael Johansson (SE).

Can cities and regions develop strategies now that reflect and allow them to respond to the fast changing market of shared mobility? Why is it necessary to focus on supporting the shift from ownership to use today and what broader relevance does this have for the future of our cities and regions? We discussed the leadership and management techniques that are already being implemented to support a shift toward a future of shared vehicles and why this is desperately necessary.

Michael Johansson, a sustainability researcher, took a scientific approach to the topic, framing the need for cities to address sustainability, climate adaptation challenges, social, environmental and economic consequences of an ever-increasing consumption of urban space through hard infrastructure and parking. Next to proactive policies on urban ecosystem services, shared mobility can contribute to a reduction of the demand for hard infrastructure in cities and an increase in green spaces. He also discussed the range of non-quantifiable values that public space can have: from spaces for social recreation and inclusion to spaces for improving local air and water quality (if designed holistically).

To download Michael’s presentation, click here.

Lars Ove Kvalbein, a sustainable transport advisor with the City of Bergen, addressed the very divergent views that the future of mobility can take and how rapidly any from of new transport can change the way cities look, feel and consume resources. He too, cited shared mobility as a form of addressing the space consumption, sustainability and resource efficiency challenges of cities, as layed out in the OECD International Tranport Forum’s “Shared Mobility –Innovation for Liveable Cities” Lisbon simulation, which demonstrated that the same level of mobility in a city can be achieved with 3% of the existing fleet if all cars were shared. The City of Bergen did a thought experiment based on this data and came to the conclusion that, under the same conditions, the 131,000 privately owned cars in the city could be reduced to 4,000 cars, which could ba accomodated by the three largest parking garages in the city. The spacial benefit and alternatives uses to parking spaces are significant!

Bergen is preparing for this future of shared transport by developing its new parking strategy to crack down on and end on-street parking, expanding residential parking schemes and developing monitoring tools for shared micromobility – and gathering experience that can later be applied to a fleet of shared autonomous vehicles.

You can download Lars’ presentation here.

If you’d perfer to view the whole webinar, the recording is available here.

This webinar, as all other past webinars, was moderated by Rebecca Karbaumer from the City of Bremen (DE) and Friso Metz from Advier (NL).