Shared Mobility leads to the development of new services according to a ZHAW School of Engineering study

"Shared Mobility is currently a fast-growing market among transport services" concludes this year’s report from the ZHAW School of Engineering.  The study investigated sharing service offers in 7 cities after recently including the focus of scooter-sharing in its analysis. Scooter sharing is popular in large cities like Paris and Berlin, while price levels are still certainly higher comparted to costs for using public transport.

Scooter sharing offers are being introduced more frequently and in diverse ways, as the example of Switzerland shows. The Swiss car-sharing provider Mobility will start an e-scooter sharing offer in Zurich using a free-floating system. This means that 200 e-scooters will be spread out in the city for use at any time without any reservation option. The company’s APP shows the location of the scooters as well as public parking spaces for motorised two-wheelers. Use of the e-scotters is charged according to the number of minutes the scooter is used for. The scooter sharing offer aims to encourage combined trips using scooters and public transport to ease the traffic load in the city. A similar service is about to start its test phase in Geneva with 50 e-scooters using a free-floating system. If tests are successful, the fleet will be extended in Geneva as well as transferred to more cities. Geneva currently already offers conventional scooter sharing.

Back to the results of the study, the analysis of ZHAW School of Engineering saw an increase of bike-sharing offers at large scale. New service providers and a larger fleet of bicycles sae a strong decrease in the prices of bike-sharing services. Players active in the market are both, private companies as well as public providers, such as the City of Zürich with its recent “Züri Velo” offer.

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Story first published by “mobilservice.ch” on 3rd of April 2018