ZHAW Study on Shared Mobility: New Rolling Rivals?

The ZHAW study on "Shared Mobility", i.e. sharing vehicles in public, is very revealing. There are new trends such as the public distribution of scooters in European cities and there is also movement in car sharing. After popular larger providers like Uber went "out of the window" in the summer of 2017 because Swiss legislation rigorously put the kibosh on the new type of transportation service Uber Pop, some new networked vehicle types did rattle into cities like Zurich. Here, however, providers find themselves on hard ground in terms of the ever-increasing supply side of bicycles, scooters and scooter or small vehicles.

The more offers there are, the lower dhe prices, underlines - briefly summarized - the current study. For the third year in a row, ZHAW students in the Transportation Systems program conducted the "Shared Mobility" study and investigated existing sharing concepts in the field of mobility in seven European cities for this purpose. The results from Zurich, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Vienna and Barcelona show that the growth of the sharing economy continued last year and led to further changes.

Bike flood is followed by scooters
"After last year's focus was on peer-to-peer services (P2P) - i.e. car sharing among private individuals - this year's study also examines scooter sharing," explains Thomas Sauter-Servaes, head of the Transportation Systems program at the ZHAW School of Engineering. In this model, scooters are offered for sharing in the same way as bicycles. Scooter sharing is experiencing rapid growth, according to the ZHAW study. Scooters are already particularly popular in Berlin and Paris. There is no such service in Zurich yet. There are large price differences between the providers. In contrast to bike sharing, the costs are still far higher than for public transport.

Bike sharing in transition
In bike sharing, major changes took place in 2017 due to the market entry of new providers. "The fleet sizes grew massively in some cases," says student Sandro Dünki, who managed the project together with Marc Aeberhard. "The aggressive expansion strategy of the mostly Asian providers surprised policymakers in various cities." Zurich, for example, gained three new providers compared to last year. The number of rental bikes there has increased by more than 200 percent to a total of 1055. The bikes from these new providers can generally be parked freely and are not tied to fixed stations. "This kind of sharing only became possible thanks to modern technologies and an almost universal spread of smartphones," says Aeberhard. This is because the prerequisite for using such a service is being able to locate and unlock the bikes at any time of day.

Vibrant Car-Sharing market
The use of Car-Sharing services in major European cities continues to be on trend. The study shows that the number of vehicles is generally increasing and the prices of all car-sharing providers have fallen. "Prices vary widely, so it's worth comparing different providers," Dünki said. The offers of the large providers were slightly cheaper overall. In Zurich, however, there is still only one provider. And public transport is still significantly cheaper than car sharing in most cities.

"The market is quite lively: New providers are joining, others are disappearing from the scene," explains Aeberhard. In addition, the difference between car sharing and P2P sharing has narrowed further, but car sharing among private individuals remains cheaper. In addition, the P2P sharing industry is still on the upswing. More and more people are offering their vehicle on a sharing platform. In most of the cities surveyed, the offer is particularly attractive for a longer rental period compared with traditional car rental.

Downloads of further charts and information from the study can be found at here