New mobility concepts: Myth or emerging reality?: Paper presented at Transport Research Arena - TRA 2014, 5th Conference - Transport Solutions: From Research to Deployment; Paris, 14 - 17 April 2014

Urban mobility seems to be at the edge of a transition towards a new mobility concept. Transport users will not buy and own a car anymore. Rather they will have a contract with a mobility service provider that will fulfil the whole variety of urban mobility needs, including offering the users shared cars. This concept is nowhere fully implemented, yet. However, the building blocks of such a concept seem to form in Europe, in Asia and even in some US cities. The paper describes such a new urban mobility concept based on sharing-instead-of-owning. It eplains the status of the emerging building blocks that form such an urban mobility concept. New mobility options, ICT technologies both on front-end applications (smart-phones, key card systems for vehicles) and on back-end (reservation and payment systems) seem currently to become available. However, the market is still forming, but with some public transport operators, most car-manufacturers and large system operators setting-up mobility service schemes the competition is driving the development of a new mobility concept. It seems to us that transport research has largely neglected the emergence of such new mobility concepts. We are lacking behavioural studies e.g. on how a user would perform modal choice in such new concept, as well as modeling studies providing us with impacts on transport demand