Travel behavior

The fight to be an official provider of electric scooters in Paris is driving firms to dredge discarded vehicles from the River Seine, run apologetic ad campaigns, redesign their models and reshape their workforces.

With an estimated 1,600 bikeshare systems and more than 18 million shared bikes in urban centers worldwide, bikesharing has gone mainstream. On July 16, 2019 users in 24 cities in 16 countries can use Google Maps to both locate bikesharing stations and see exactly how many bikes are available at a station in real-time.

One of the big promises of self-driving vehicles is the idea that autonomous vehicles will liberate people from driving. In this vision of the future, passengers will scan news reports on phones and tablets, pour-over notes and briefings for important meetings, and view videos on their handheld devices. They will reclaim the hours once wasted clinging to a steering wheel. Unless they end up developing a headache or becoming dizzy, drowsy, or nauseated.

This report shows tables of ridership dates and how they compare to the previous year in major US cities and Canada.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent a potentially disruptive yet beneficial change to our transportation system. This new technology has the potential to impact vehicle safety, congestion, and travel behavior. All told, major social AV impacts in the form of crash savings, travel time reduction, fuel efficiency and parking benefits are estimated to approach $2000 to per year per AV, and may eventually approach nearly $4000 when comprehensive crash costs are accounted for. Yet barriers to implementation and mass-market penetration remain. Initial costs will likely be unaffordable. Licensing and testing standards in the U.S. are being developed at the state level, rather than nationally, which may lead to inconsistencies across states. Liability details remain undefined, security concerns linger, and without new privacy standards, a default lack of privacy for personal travel may become the norm. The impacts and interactions with other components of the transportation system, as well as implementation details, remain uncertain. To address these concerns, the federal government should expand research in these areas and create a nationally recognized licensing framework for AVs, determining appropriate standards for liability, security, and data privacy.

In recent years, economic, environmental, and social forces have quickly given rise to the “sharing economy,” a collective of entrepreneurs and consumers leveraging technology to share resources, save money, and generate capital. Homesharing services, such as Airbnb, and peer-to-peer carsharing services, such as Getaround, have become part of a sociodemographic trend that has pushed the sharing economy from the fringe and more to the mainstream. The role of shared mobility in the broader landscape of urban mobility has become a frequent topic of discussion. Major shared transportation modes—such as bikesharing, carsharing, ridesourcing, and alternative transit services—are changing how people travel and are having a transformative effect on mobility and local planning.

This report is the culmination of the Connected Mobility Initiative launched by the New Cities Foundation in June 2015. "The primary aim of the initiative is to explore the triple convergence of “mobility” — physical, digital, and socio economic — and to propose strategies and steps of this transformation while ameliorating its potentially corrosive effects on public institutions. To this end, the report is split between brief policies of four cities Washington, D.C., London, Sao Paulo, and Manila — facing challenges representative of their respective peers, along with a list of near-, mid-, and long-term recommendations for transport authorities to aid them in their transformations.

This report analyzes traffic impacts from the 2015 implementation of a pilot “road diet” on Lincoln Avenue, in the City of San Jose, California, comparing data on traffic volumes and speeds from before and after the road diet was implemented. The analysis looks at impacts on both the road diet location itself and on surrounding streets likely to have been impacted by traffic diverted off the road diet segment. The results within the road diet zone were as expected, with falling volumes and numbers of speeders. The all-day data aggregated by street type (e.g., neighborhood streets, major streets) showed limited overall negative impacts outside the road diet segment. These summary results do not tell the entire story, however. Individual locations, particularly among the neighborhood streets, saw more noticeable negative impacts. The report ends with recommendations for best practices in designing and conducting road diet evaluation studies.

We review the history, current developments, projected future trends and environmental impacts of automated vehicles (AVs) and on-demand mobility, and explore potential synergies. Many automobile manufacturers and Google plan to release AVs between 2017 and 2020, with potential benefits including increased safety, more efficient road use, increased driver productivity and energy savings. Combining on-demand mobility and AVs may amplify adoption of both, and further lower energy use and GHG emissions through the use of small, efficient shared AVs.