Promoting sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide
ITD-China’s strategy to shared mobility focuses mainly on developing best practice public policy and plans for shaping shared mobility to ensure sustainable outcomes.ITDP-China focuses less on endorsing particular modes or business models, and more on proactively crafting outcome-based policies to ensure sustainable impacts and decrease unsustainable outcomes. ITDP-China’s shared mobility program mainly focuses on expanding and improving a rich and diverse set of alternatives to private automobile travel that complement and promote public transit, walking and cycling, transit-oriented development, and travel demand management as the core of sustainable transport. ITDP-China supports shared mobility policies and services that serve the following objectives:
Bicycle sharing system is a main part of shared mobility for its convenience, flexible and environmental-friendly. ITDP-China has lots of good experiences on designing and operating bicycle sharing systems and a very good relationship with cities where bicycle sharing system well applied, such as Guangzhou, Hangzhou, etc. As ITDP-China regards bicycle sharing system a good way to solve “last kilometer” problem. More details of cycle sharing systems could be found in this link:
ITDP-China have an idea to input e-bikes into cycle sharing system in the future to enlarge its service area in China so that VKT could be reduced.
ITDP-China believes car-sharing is an important part of a transition to a more sustainable city and transport system and away from car ownership. Car-sharing is an important alternative to vehicle ownership, a means to reducing parking and thus increasing density, and can be an important mobility resource to households that cannot afford to own a car. ITDP-China supports city policies supportive of car-sharing such as priority for parking spaces. Equitable distribution of car-sharing in a city, decreasing overall parking supply and increasing cost for privately-owned vehicles, and tax structures that facilitate short-term car-share rentals.
ITDP-China believes ridesharing is an improvement on existing on-demand car services. Ridesharing allows for an increased load factor in vehicles, which may be especially helpful in low-density settings or at off-peak hours when mass transit is not as viable. ITDP-China encourages the use of ridesharing as part of the package of options that allow high-quality accessibility without owning a car. Using city policy such as “HOV first lane” is an affordable and efficient opinion to be applied in tier 1 cities as well as crowded large tier 2 cities in China.
ITDP-China believes that setting outcome-based policies that ensure any technology or service that can meet community goals for accessibility, safety, health, environment, and equity should be able to compete. In the face of future Autonomous Vehicles (AV)’s, ITDP-China endorses increasing the cost of owning a vehicle to be equal or greater than its cost to society, VKT/road usage/congestion, ensuring access to data that will make such regulation possible, taxes on zero-occupancy vehicles, consideration of public space design and impacts for such a future. As a pioneer in this area in China, ITDP-China takes efforts to organize site visit programs to Europe and North America. Officers, designers and planners from China have the chances to receive new ideas and methods and spread them in their own cities. Though in a short-term phase, MAAS may not be able to be applied in reality, ITDP-China believes this idea would be accepted and agreed by more and more planners and even policy makers and finally makes a difference.