OP-ED: Shifting institutions to create the shared mobility revolution

One of the books that has shaped my own thinking of how change happens and how we progress is Douglas Allen’s The Institutional Revolution. In his book, Allen looks at how technology reshaped or created new institutions in 18th century England and “traces the dramatic shift from premodern institutions based on patronage, purchase and personal ties toward modern institutions based on standardization, merit and wage labor—a shift which was crucial to the explosive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution.”

Hundreds of years later, we find ourselves on the cusp of another institutional shift—a shift in how we choose to invest in and build out our transportation systems. Allen’s pre-modern institutions—the rules, norms and organizational arrangements—worked because they made sense but were upended because of new technologies from the Industrial Revolution. Now, the rules, norms and organizational arrangements for our transportation systems are requiring a shift because of advancements in technology and the need to create more accessible, affordable and sustainable ways to get around. We must create and encourage institutional foundations and processes that allow shared mobility to be friendly to the planet and work for everyone.

But the development of new institutions is a gradual process that requires experimentation and trial and error. It is not the result of any one person or government's actions. That is why the Shared Mobility 2030 Action Agenda convenes cross-sector stakeholders to find ways to scale and replicate shared mobility pilot projects to provide more mobility access. Specifically, Action Agenda item No. 7 calls for us to “move from ad hoc, project-level management teams to systemwide governance and planning structures to purposely expand shared mobility and provide more transportation options to move everyone.”

The unfolding of the industrial revolution from the 1600s to the early 1800s rapidly upended how we build our cities and how we get around. The revolution in shared mobility in this century is no less profound. Powered by internet connectivity and mobile telecommunications, shared mobility exploded over the past decade. From car-sharing to ride-hailing, from docked to dockless bike shares, from shared scooters to on-demand and microtransit, the decade was a veritable cambrian explosion of new business models, vehicles and technologies.

Allen published his book in 2012. In October 2013, Susan Shaheen, then-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, convened the first Shared-Use Mobility Summit with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Shaheen had help from David Bragdon, the then-new executive director of TransitCenter, and from Sharon Feigon, then-CEO of Alternative Transportation for Chicagoland, which ran I-Go, one of the first community car-sharing services in the U.S.

Feigon recounts that “105 private companies attended the summit and 62 governmental agencies were represented at the summit. Of the 194 organizations represented, 26 were affiliated with carsharing, 16 with bikesharing and six were associated with ridesharing and on-demand ride services or transportation network companies.”

A year after the summit, Feigon, with help from Shaheen, Bragdon and Center for Neighborhood Technology Founder Scott Bernstein, started the Shared-Use Mobility Center. The summit became an annual event that convened emerging shared mobility and morphed into the National Shared Mobility Summit.

The mobility companies that emerged over the decade have come and gone. Some became decacorns. Some merged and swallowed other companies or were sold or closed. The indelible change was the technologies and the modes. Getting from point A to point B used to be a choice between taking a car or public transportation (usually a bus); shared mobility exploded our choices in the cities where they were allowed to take root.

Meanwhile, public agencies charged with transportation and transit moved from wariness to embrace shared mobility. Agencies ran pilots, created new mobility teams and hired mobility managers and drafted playbooks for and regulations for shared mobility. The U.S. Department of Transportation added “shared mobility” to its definitions and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) allowed agencies to use capital funds to build facilities for shared bikes and scooters (But not for the bikes themselves, something that needs to change.) The FTA funded research innovation pilots and convened communities of practice like the Mobility Innovation Collaborative.

A decade on, shared mobility technologies—including public transportation—continue to evolve. The institutions and the institutional arrangements that foster more transportation options also need to change. While public transportation is facing a fiscal cliff and private shared mobility companies struggle to find funding and business models that work, the sector continues to evolve. The institutions are morphing. The values and goals that guide our transportation systems are being questioned and revised. I am optimistic that the shared mobility institutional revolution is just beginning.

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Benjie de la Peña is the CEO of Shared-Use Mobility Center. 

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