Shared Mobility in MaaS Systems: A Supply and Demand Perspective

Abstract

Transportation faces big challenges and major changes. Challenges relate to the increasing severity of the climate crisis, which is also caused by greenhouse gas emissions from transportation (26 % of EU-emissions). Cities in particular face further challenges such as competing interests for land-use and congestion, which is intensified by growing urban populations. Within the avoidshift-improve concept, much attention has been paid to improve, i.e. increasing efficiency, while shifting or avoiding transport demand is often forgotten. Major changes regarding the new paradigms shared mobility and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) hold the promise of addressing some of these challenges. By using more energy and space efficient vehicles (e.g. micro-mobility: e-scooters, (e-) bikes) and integrating these in mobility plans (MaaS bundles), a more multi- and intermodal mobility behaviour could be achieved. To leverage this potential, the nexus of supply and demand needs to be analysed to answer these questions: why are travellers (not) using shared services or MaaS bundles and what does it take to increase their usage? This thesis does so by using business models, i.e. formal conceptual representations of how firms function, as a linking element. This linkage is established by developing a framework characterising MaaS offers and selecting crucial aspects that are analysed empirically in detail. The framework builds on an original combination of morphological analysis and the Business Model Canvas. It shows that the use-case for MaaS offers needs to be very clear from the start as extensive interdependencies amongst the elements make later changes substantially more expensive. Two strategies can make a service valuable and viable: increasing the number of integrated modes and offering MaaS bundles. This is the starting point of the empirical work that uses demand and supply data. The primary demand-side data is collected in 83 large cities and metropolises in Germany and uses stated preference choice-experiments regarding mode and MaaS bundle choice. The supply-side data is primary and secondary data on public transport (PT) quality and shared mobility supply densities. Results show that costs are more important to travellers for car-based shared services than travel time while these are equally important for shared micro-mobility. Mode-shift from walking to all shared services, particularly shared micro-mobility, and from the private car to carsharing and ridepooling are found. Integrating the supply-side reveals that MaaS bundles require a high level of PT and shared mobility service to be attractive for travellers. While frequent car usage negatively impacts MaaS bundles’ utility, shared mobility usage increases it, particularly for shared bikes and cars. This thesis extends previous work by including all relevant shared mobility services, using data across multiple cities, and integrating the supply- and demand-side, which has consequences for the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of the transportation sector.