Thesis
A Local Government Deliberation Support Tool for New Mobility Solutions
I. IDENTITY
II. DESCRIPTION
III. FILTERS
Midway between private cars and public transport, shared mobility services - carpooling, carsharing, electric carsharing systems - represent a change in our transportation systems that is well underway. Diverse constraints explain these recent innovations: increasing transportation costs, energy independence, environmental issues, climate change, increase in family car budgets (French Centre for Strategic Analysis (CSA), 2012). As mentioned in CSA's report on new mobility in suburban and rural territories, "the role of local initiative, in particular on the part of local authorities, wille be increasingly important in the future". Local authorities therefore need to be equipped with a powerful deliberation support tool that provides them the means to opt for a particular mode of shared mobility, which, in tandem with public transportation, should be part of a multimodal transport plan.
These emerging sustainable mobility solutions should be based on sufficiently robus business models, to ensure both their long-term effectiveness and financial sustainability. It is therefore necessary to understand both the structure and the dynamics of new markets, which are still highly unstable.
Such economic analysis should lead to a deliberation model, whose purpose is to provide communities with the means to better evaluate the economic benefits that stem from the variety of new mobility systems on the market.
Understanding the allocation of public space - including parking - and its distribution between complementary but also competitive uses is at the heart of the prerogatives and therefore the concerns of local government. The allocation of public spaces to operators of new mobility services, cost sharing between the community, the operator and the user, signage, innovative methods of payment and incentive mechanisms for the use of new mobility systems (for instance, coupling with public transportation) (Shaheen et al., 2009) are all social choices requiring clarification for local communities. The issues of governance, funding and sharing of revenue from new mobility services play an important part in this research.
This research will first analyse the economic, environmental and social stakes of shared mobility services. For this purpose, we have chosen several possible experimental territories in the Yvelines county in Western Greater Paris, such as the Communauté d'Agglomération de Versailles Grand Parc, the Communauté d'Agglomération de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, or the Etablissement Public de Paris-Saclay. These territories host mobility demonstrator projects that unity an unprecedented diversity of stakeholders: local authorities, the entire French car industry and a wide range of industrial partners from complementary sectors (energy, ecology, suppliers, rail mobility providers).
By identifying the offer - carpooling operators, traditional and peer-to-peer carsharing providers, automobile manufacturers and suppliers - and the demand - the future users of these services - the analysis will focus on better understanding who the players are in this new ecosystems and on identifying the critical issues that it faces: economic viability, social acceptability, environmental performance, system sustainability.
Secondly, this work should lead to the selection of economic, social and environmental performance indicators thanks to the multi-criteria multi-stakeholder analysis tools developed by the REEDS International Centre. We then might identify the subset of economic, environmental and social costs and benefits related to new mobility solutions. Though the principal field of this research is Economics, it will be based on multidisciplinary skills, such as mobility management, transition management, environmental economics, public management and transport economics.
This work will concentrate on elaborating a deliberation support tool which will enable local government and its surrounding stakeholders to make better decisions on the mobility solutions they implement on their territory.
Ideally this should lead to more robust, participatory decision making closer to citizens' needs and aspirations. Thus, through an iterative process between technical experts, citeizens and other stakeholders, the economic risks associated with the deployment of new mobility solutions by local government should be diminished.
Initially based on data from the Greater Paris Region, the tool should be able to evolve in order to be applied to other cities, in France or elsewhere in Europe.