It’s like Uber, but for….

(Defining the Transportation Technology Space)

Go online to AngelList, a tech company database that helps match startups with investors, and you’ll find 1,283 companies listed as “transportation startups”.

The scope of their services vary; but all are part of the emerging landscape of tech-enabled mobility options. Many of these companies have blossomed out from the so-called sharing economy and its digital peer-to-peer marketplaces. In the sharing economy, access and overall mobility are prioritized over ownership, thus providing a smooth transition to a car-free or car-light lifestyle. Sharing economy services are especially relevant to millennials, where the number of cars purchased by people aged 18 to 34 fell by almost 30 percent from 2007 to 2011.

All of these companies are having real, significant impact in cities around the country (and the world!) with regards to:

• Personal vehicle ownership: Recent research on North American carsharing services from the UC Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center found for each carsharing vehicle that goes into a roundtrip car-sharing service, it supplants four to six new car sales and postpones the purchase of up to seven more on average.
• Accessibility: some private companies are ignoring the Americans with Disabilities Act and not providing wheelchair accessible ramps and on-board wheelchair space, raising questions around equity of these services.
• The taxi industry: legal battles around whether such companies are transportation companies subject to the same medallion permitting system within the tightly regulated taxi industry, or merely a software platform.
• Labor: namely, whether drivers are considered W-2 employees of the company or 1099 contractors (and thus not eligible for certain benefits). The California Public Utilities Commission made its first ruling on this issue in June 2015, deciding that Uber owed one of its drivers money for business expenses.
• And much, much more.

The space is rapidly expanding and evolving — which is exciting, but also difficult to stay on top of.

For any transportation planners scratching their heads- here’s a quick primer.

Shared Mobility

Perhaps one of the broadest terms, shared mobility refers to transportation assets that users share. It encompasses different modes of transportation- such as bikes, cars, and even scooters, and can have both public and private business models. Often, you must be a member of the platform to access its vehicle fleet. While shared mobility is more established than other transportation technology services, more research is needed on its overall impacts.

There are two main marketplaces for shared mobility:

• Peer-to-Peer (P2P): where individuals share access to personal vehicles in order to offset the costs of ownership.
• Business-to-Consumer (B2C): where a company makes their vehicle fleet available to members of the platform.

Bikesharing

Originally created in Amsterdam in 1965, bikesharing is now a worldwide phenomenon. According to the Shared Use Mobility Center, there are more than 770 bikeshare systems, with more than 60 based in the United States alone.

Bikesharing has evolved significantly over the last 50 years. While the original fleets were usually crudely painted bikes, distributed haphazardly (and free of cost) around city centers, today’s systems are sophisticated. Modern bikeshare systems typically feature:

• Smartcards or mobile apps for fare payment
• Touch screen kiosks
• Stations located near transit hubs
• GPS tracking on the bikes
• The use of technology and vehicle fleets to help rebalance bikes across stations

Bikesharing systems have a clear impact on other travel modes — especially personal driving. In a survey conducted with bikeshare users in five major North American cities, the Mineta Transportation Institute found that bikesharing reduces personal driving by 29% in Montreal, 35% in Toronto, and by more than 50% in Mexico City, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Salt Lake City.

A private sector example of shared mobility: Getaround is a peer-to-peer, on-demand carsharing marketplace. Cars are rented, unlocked and driven via an app.

Carsharing

According to the UC Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center’s Summer 2015 Carsharing Survey, there are approximately 1,529,811 carsharing members sharing 22,134 vehicles in the Americas.

These systems vary in operations. Some, like Zipcar or the non-profit City CarShare, require drivers to rent and return their vehicle from the same parking spot. Others, like Car2Go, operate more like a bikeshare system, where drivers can make one-way, point-to-point trips. Additionally, in peer-to-peer models like RelayRides and Getaround, the fleets are personally owned vehicles being rented out to drivers.

To date, there are few robust surveys that fully evaluate the impacts of carsharing in terms of vehicle miles traveled and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, preliminary findings are promising. Based on a survey with individuals in roundtrip carsharing programs around North America, UC Berkeley researchers found a 27% reduction in vehicle kilometers traveled per year, and a −0.58 tons reduction of GHG/year per household on average.

Microtransit

Chariot, a microtransit service that crowdsources routes from their community of riders.

Microtransit systems are fleets of privately-owned vans and shuttle buses. Their routes are flexible and based on user demand. Most microstranist systems (i.e Bridj, MagicBus, or Chariot) are focused on commuter routes.

Depending on who you talk to, microtransit can complement or compete with typical public transit networks. A major opportunity for complementarity is around route integration. For example, microtransit services could act as feeder routes that help connect people to major transit hubs.

However, they also can present challenges to public transit — such as poaching public transit riders entirely, and disrupting existing public transit routes by adding more congestion to the roads.

Microtransit and public transit tensions first came to a head in 2014 when private Google commuter buses in San Francisco were illegally using Muni bus stops as loading zones. In 2015, another microtransit company called Leap rose to notoriety for its exclusivity, fancy decor, and lack of wheelchair accessibility. The service was shut down in May 2015 for not obtaining a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission.

Ridesourcing

(related terms: TNCs and e-hail services)

Ridesourcing is the smart-phone version of a taxi: instead of a street hail, passengers request a car through an app. Lyft and Uber services are the most prominent ride-sourcing companies in the U.S., though there are many worldwide. E-hail services are a specific type of ridesourcing that only apply to traditional taxis. The company Flywheel is an example of this service, in which their app only hails traditional, medallioned taxis.

Ridesourcing companies are also called Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) by regulators. Coined in September 2013 by the California Public Utilities Commission, TNCs are defined as an operator that “provides prearranged transportation services for compensation using an online-enabled application or platform (such as smartphone applications) to connect drivers using their personal vehicles with passengers.”

The term was created when California policymakers first began to consider how they would regulate these companies, and whether they fit classical definitions of ridesharing, for-hire vehicle services, or peer-to-peer taxis services.

For a TNC to obtain a license from the CPUC, they must conduct criminal background checks on all drivers and have a:

• Driver training program
• “Zero tolerance” policy on drugs and alcohol
• Insurance coverage of at least $1 million per incident (including when the app is turned on and there are no passengers, and “in service” with passengers)

Additionally, TNCs must submit reporting data around driver training, accessibility, accidents, and drivers’ logged hours/miles.

Currently, there is no formal evidence to suggest whether TNC services increase or decrease overall greenhouse gas emissions. While ride-sourcing services make it incredibly easy to travel by car (and thus disincentivize other modes of transport), there are some arguments to be made around their benefits. For example, they can support first/last mile connections to transit, and they can provide relief when walking, biking, or transit are less practical (i.e. bad weather, carrying bulky items, etc.).

There is still much to be understood around the impacts of ride-sourcing- both in terms of passenger and driver behaviors. Anecdotally, the huge contrast in profit margins between local markets — i.e. San Francisco vs. Modesto — incentivizes drivers to commute long distances to drive in other cities. On a regional level, these trends should be taken into account.

Ridesharing

(related terms: carpooling, vanpooling, ride-splitting, casual carpooling)

First and foremost: Calling Uber and Lyft ride-sharing services is a misnomer. However, they have created additional services that are considered ride-splitting (UberPOOL and Lyft Line).

Share the ride, share the cost: UberPOOL and Lyft Line adapt their original ride-sourcing services to focus on trip aggregation.

Ridesharing focuses on filling empty seats in vehicles; in essence, it’s the 21st century word for carpooling and vanpooling. Ridesharing groups travelers into a privately owned vehicle, and all riders pay a share of the cost of the trip. Ride-splitting is a specific type of ridesharing service, in that it only applies to shared TNC (i.e. Uber or Lyft) rides.

Technology plays an important role in today’s ridesharing ecosystem: users can request a trip on-demand, and software continues to more effectively group travelers based on the origin and destination of their trips.

There are also a growing set of companies using app-enabled technology to facilitate more casual carpooling for commuters. With these services (i.e. Carma, Split, and Lyft’s Driver Destination), the drivers set the destination, and payment is intended to be merely fare reimbursement.

Already, we’re seeing how ridesharing services have the potential to act as a first/last-mile solution that connects people to regional transportation networks. For example, Lyft reports that more than 20% of their Lyft Line Bay Area trips have an origin or destination at a Caltrain or BART station.

So, in summary:

An additional consideration:

Courier Network Services

While these services squarely fall under logistics, on-demand couriers are important to highlight because of the implications they have on the built environment (congestion, potential VMT increases, etc.).

Courier Network Services refer to the on-demand, app-enabled delivery of packages and documents by people on bicycle, in cars, or on foot (like Postmates). Increasingly, many on-demand courier companies are solely focused on restaurant partnerships to deliver food (like Caviar).

Food and grocery delivery is one of the hottest venture capital sectors right now: in 2014, the sector drew over $1 billion in investments.

Because this industry is so new, there is little evidence to show whether they are actually adding more vehicles to the road beyond existing food delivery. However, the rise of on-demand couriers may point to needed changes in roadway design to accommodate the growing number of curbside deliveries.

…So what does this all mean for transportation planning?

(some big questions)

While there are many big questions around this topic, here are my top 5 concerns for planners and policymakers to be thinking about:

1. Does the transportation technology space have a positive or negative effect on vehicle miles traveled and greenhouse gas emissions?
2. Are there opportunities for transit agencies and governments to partner with these companies on delivering transportation services? (i.e. data to inform route planning, paratransit, specialized routes, etc.)
3. What kinds of data can these companies share with regional planning agencies to support more informed travel models and data-driven decision making?
4. How can the transportation technology space be supported by governments’ transportation demand management (TDM) efforts?
5. How might cities’ built environments need to be re-designed to accommodate changing travel behaviors (and goods movement)?

Looking Ahead

Understanding the relationship between these new technologies and how they fit into local and regional transportation networks is critical. While the transportation technology space (not to mention vehicle technology itself) is quickly changing, governments can’t dismiss these apps as a passing fad.

Some cities are beginning to respond in exciting ways. We’re seeing early partnerships between these companies and governments like Boston, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York City. However, these instances are not yet the norm, and I don’t believe that either party really quite (yet) knows how to make the partnership as meaningful as possible.

One thing I’m particularly excited about is Mayor Eric Garcetti’s recent appointment of Ashley Hand as a transportation technology strategist fellow at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). Blending this kind tech savvy with transportation planning is a promising next step, and I can’t wait to see what she accomplishes. This speaks to a larger need for governments to allocate the appropriate staff time, resources, and skills towards addressing this new frontier.

P.S….Thanks!

I was really lucky to get some help on this article. Big thanks to:

• Terra Curtis, Transportation Planning Associate, Nelson\Nygaard
• Amanda Eaken, Deputy Director, Urban Solutions, Natural Resources Defense Council
• Scott Owades, Growth, Chariot
• Dr. Susan Shaheen, Co-Director, Transportation Sustainability Research Center and Adjunct Professor, UC Berkeley

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This brief was prepared for Mike McKeever, Chief Executive Officer of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. September 2015.