From Ownership to Access: The Socio-Technical Shift in Smart Mobility.

Climate change mitigation requires transformative changes in cities. Rapid urban population growth, traffic congestion, and related air pollution, as well as aging infrastructure and energy usage, put cities at the center of the climate mitigation agenda. In 2050, 6.5 billion of the world’s population will live in cities.

Environmental implications are highly related to the consumption of natural resources for energy production and greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change. Currently, cities are responsible for 60 to 80% of all energy consumption and approximately 70% of carbon emissions in the world.

In the last few years, urban areas have rapidly developed due to the increase in the number of inhabitants. The urbanization process and urban development have led to about half of the population living in cities. As previously stated, the percentage increases to 75 % in Europe. A smart city is an area where ICTs are largely used to increase operational efficiency, quality of services, and the well-being of citizens. Being an integral part of the smart city context, digital technologies provide precise analytics enabling further development of urban policies, especially in the urban mobility domain.

Smart mobility is one of the main pillars of the smart city concept. It is based on optimizing transportation in urban areas. Mobility optimization can be achieved by introducing innovative solutions for citizens through enabling information and communication technologies. In addition to public transport services, smart mobility provides several solutions, such as sharing mobility, Mobility as a Service, mobility on demand, and autonomous transport systems.

The main smart mobility objectives are reducing pollution, and traffic congestion, increasing people’s safety, diminishing noise pollution; improving transfer speed, and reducing transfer costs. Modern mobility and connectivity solutions are designed to facilitate non-stop access to sharing products and services. For this reason, it is important that mobility applications are characterized by functions that are intuitive and easy to understand, and used by consumers, such as to get more useful and satisfactory results.

“According to research on shared mobility services, by reducing the number of private vehicles on the road and promoting the use of cleaner vehicles, sharing mobility contributes to improved air quality in urban areas, leading to better health outcomes for residents.”

Sharing mobility systems is a fundamental variable of the smart city model, representing an articulated transport system based on a digital infrastructure capable of flexibly sharing both vehicles and trails, contributing to the optimization of the use of resources and fostering collaboration within the entire mobility chain. The main actors in this scenario are producers of transport equipment, providers of mobility services, municipal agencies, and consumers.

The basic idea of this mobility concept is the shift from mobility predominantly based on ownership towards services based on access. This transition could be defined as socio-technical because technology has played a predominant role in enabling this process innovation, making it more flexible and able to be integrated with other traditional transportation solutions.

Sharing mobility involves the shared use of vehicles, scooters, bicycles, electric micro-mobility, or other modes of travel. Sharing mobility is one of the most innovative transportation strategies that allow people to have short-term access to transportation, depending on their needs. Sharing mobility may include one-way services that may be returned to another location, round-trip services that will be returned from the point of departure, or returned anywhere within a geographical boundary.