The Laws of Sharing
UNCONVENTIONAL, SHARED URBAN MOBILITY HAS EXPLODED. NOW WHO IS TO REGULATE IT AND HOW?by Valerio Lubello
Translated by Alex Foti
Over the past decade, a certain synergy between private and public operator powers in a technological and digital crucible have led to the emergence and development of new forms of urban mobility. So bike sharing, car sharing, car-pooling and the like, thanks to the different forms of public support, have become one of the choices available to users who want to move around in urban and suburban areas. One element, in fact, of existing urban systems is multimodal mobility. The landscape is full of alternatives: the sharing of cars and scooters to be picked up at various fixed stations (when the transportation is picked up and deposited at the same point) or free floating (when the vehicle can be taken and dropped off in different parts of the city). Or bike sharing models extending beyond the subway network alone.
The sector is characterized by a certain liveliness and there are openings for new and different transport systems, ancillary to public transportation as it is commonly understood. From a point of view closer to the normative framework, the pioneering character and the novelty of service innovations justifies only in part the few and uncoordinated interventions in terms of public norms. Formulas for encouragement of new urban mobility came from the White Paper on Transport, adopted in 2011 by the European Commission, also identified as part of the 20/20/20 Energy and Climate Plan, but are struggling to take off at larger scales. The result is that we are still far from a European Union definition of the relevant principles and standards. Likewise, at the level of national law, the interventions in the field have been limited to various forms of incentive, repeated intermittently (most recently with the so-called Environmental Annex of 2015), lacking the aspiration of arriving at a common regulatory design. Some legislative initiative has been taken by Regions (e.g. Lombardy), but it is undoubtedly the municipal level that deserves more attention today.
It is at the city level, in fact, that there has been experimentation with and development of – even in terms of regulation – new services of urban mobility. A hypothetical legislative action – provided that it has the ambition of being systematic – would then be able, on the one hand, to support economic initiative and the search for new services by levels of government that are closer to the end user. On the other hand, it would prevent the proliferation of service models from having the negative corollary of a lack of interoperability between services and networks. Once the best level for intervention is decided, it is then necessary to fully understand whether and how much to stimulate various alternative mobility models. This is where a good part of the game is played. Is it right to encourage sustainable mobility with incentives? And, if yes, what kind of mobility? How? The open questions that remain are many and the attempts of synthesis by multi-stakeholder proposals should be welcomed. It is not easy to capture and orient an ecosystem that is evolving quickly. One thing is certain: the road ahead will be traveled by unconventional means!
