Shared mobility for the first and last mile

Abstract

Over the past decade, the development of ICT and online platforms has
provided the infrastructure for new ways of sharing on a scale never seen
before which are causing a shift from ownership to access-based- consumption.
This trend offers promising prospects for the case of mobility but the true
magnitude of impact that the increasing popularity of shared mobility services
will have on the total transportation system remains uncertain. For NS, as
largest railway operator in the Netherlands, it is therefore relevant to
investigate how these new services can contribute to better first and last mile
transportation within the multimodal train trip, as most of these types of shared
mobility operate on an urban scale. Accordingly, this study aims to explore and
measure the factors that affect people’s willingness to use shared mobility
services as access or egress transport in multimodal train trips. A series of
stated choice experiments was developed in which respondents were asked to
choose their preferred mode from a set of alternatives for a given access- or
egress trip. Next to conventional modes, included shared modes were bike,
(standing) e-scooter, and car. By applying discrete choice modelling, separate
mixed logit models were estimated for the home-based side trip (origin to
railway station) and the activity based side trip (railway station to final
destination) in order to assess the impact of choice factors related to characteristics
of the available modes, trip, and traveler. Results show that the willingness
to use shared modes is in the first place strongly affected by familiarity with
these modes. As the overall observed familiarity and in particular experience
with shared modes was low, intrinsic (negative) mode preferences were found to
be the dominating choice factors. This was especially the cases for shared
e-scooter and to a lesser extent also for the shared car. Traveler
characteristics were found affect the magnitude of the fixed mode preference in
a sense that young and higher educated travelers significantly appeared to be
more open to try shared modes. Contrary to the e-scooter and car, the shared
bike exemplifies a more familiar option which was found to results in a
different hierarchy of mode related factors: the general fixed mode preference
becomes less dominant and usage costs gains more importance.