Technology, transport, and the sharing economy: towards a working taxonomy for shared mobility

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in studying the interactions between the fields of digital technology and transport and multiple terms to describe these interactions have been proposed. These include terms such as “smart mobility”, “new mobility”, “3-revolutions” and “Mobility-as-a-Service”, amongst others. While these terms encompass a wide range of technology-transportation interactions, all of them include shared mobility as one of its elements, yet there is still no broadly accepted definition in the academic literature of what the term “shared mobility” means or what type of technology-transport interactions it encompasses. The aim of this paper is to propose a taxonomy for shared mobility based on a critical engagement with the main bodies of literature across disciplinary areas that underpin this concept: (1) the interactions between digital technology and transport, and (2) the broader concept of the sharing economy. Though these two elements are sometimes mentioned together in the literature as relevant to shared mobility, to the authors’ knowledge they have not yet been combined in a published study to explicitly propose a definition or taxonomy. Having a clearly defined and broadly accepted terminology for shared mobility is important, as this is a term that is used not only in the academic literature, but also by policymakers and in policy documents, and the lack of a definition leads to a lack of clarity and shared understanding of what shared mobility involves. The literature reviewed carried out for this paper suggests that different authors use the term shared mobility in diverse ways to refer to a diverse set of solutions. The proposed taxonomy can therefore be used by public and private policymakers and academics alike to speak a common language when referring to, planning for, and evaluating shared mobility solutions.