Governing shared mobility: a comparison of the public policy goals being pursued in three cities

Sebastian Castellanos (), Katy Wright and Susan Grant-Muller
Additional contact information
Sebastian Castellanos: University of Leeds
Katy Wright: University of Leeds
Susan Grant-Muller: University of Leeds

Transportation, 2025, vol. 52, issue 4, No 9, 1429-1456

Abstract: Abstract Shared mobility services such as shared scooters, bikes, and ridehailing services have transformed the urban mobility landscape in recent years. In this paper we identify the goals that local governments are pursuing when regulating these private services. We also analyse the circumstances and motivations that led to the pursuit of these goals. For this, we carried out three in-depth case studies of cities where private companies had deployed shared mobility services: Bogotá, Colombia; Paris, France; and Los Angeles, USA. We found that there is a wide range of goals (34 distinct goals) that the governments of these cities are pursuing when attempting to regulate shared mobility services. However, only between three and four of these goals tend to dominate most of their actions. We also identified a mix of motivations for the pursuit of these goals: from the public interest of redressing past inequities, to circumstantial motivations such as appeasing the incumbents that have seen their businesses endangered by these new technologies. The academic literature converges on sustainability and equitable access being two of the primary goals to be pursued in transport policy, but our findings suggest that practitioners and policymakers are pursuing a range of other goals that do not fit neatly into these two theoretical categories.

Keywords: Shared mobility; New mobility; Smart mobility; Governance; Policy; Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11116-023-10461-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:transp:v:52:y:2025:i:4:d:10.1007_s11116-023-10461-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-023-10461-6

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().