Today, major urban centers in Europe and the US can boast dozens of shared mobility services eliminating a need in private cars. However, research indicates that even though car ownership has shown early signs of decline, the majority of people are not yet ready to give it up for good.
Car ownership rate per 1000 people
Source: Statistical pocketbook 2018 provided by Directorate General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE) Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 36.2
So the question is "why?"
We ran a series of surveys and customer interviews, which all suggested that the number one reason for this phenomenon was confidence gap. When it comes to commuting it is that simple: we want to be fully assured that we will always have a solution to move smoothly from point A to B.
In the late XV century, John Locke introduced the concept of "human rights," which included the right to life, personal security, equality, freedom of thought, and other basic needs. They were later incorporated into the Bill of Rights and inspired human rights pillars in other countries.
Today, "freedom of movement" can and should be considered a basic human right – the freedom to access secure, convenient, accessible and affordable means to run our lives. However, it seems that thus far we have only partially materialized it. As more people moved into cities and cities expanded, more and more people started using cars to commute. Cars answered all of our needs. Although convenient and reliable, cars also brought negative consequences to our cities: air pollution, accidents, parking burden, and ever-increasing congestion. In fact, inner city car speed often does not exceed 4.7 m/hour [1] . For the past 30 years, we have been living an urban transportation crisis.
New opportunities are born when you have a crisis, and that is exactly what has been happening. Entrepreneurs started to look for ways to provide citizens with fast and affordable alternative transportation solutions that are better fit to the modern urban lifestyle.
Mobility Revolution 1.0 – On-Demand
With the rise of smart phones, the car "moved" to our phone. Now, we can book on-demand mobility services for short-term rentals (e.g Zipcar, Car2Go) and ride hailing trips (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Grab and others).
This revolution created some of the largest Unicorns of 2,000s and changed our mobility habits. Unfortunately, it failed to provide a solution to the transportation crisis, which got even worse! More ride-hailing cars flooded the streets, increasing overall traffic as drivers often float around, waiting for passengers. Congestion and pollution levels did not become lower, but rather intensified.
Yet again, crisis creates opportunities, so more entrepreneurs have moved into disrupting the transportation world.
Mobility Revolution 2.0 – Mobility as a Service (MaaS)
People who own cars typically use them as their main means of transportation. The new mobility entrepreneurs focused on unbundling the car and providing users with a variety of solutions tailored to their immediate commuting needs (e.g. bicycles, electric scooters, motorcycles).
This makes it possible to commute from point A to point B faster, without having to own different (or any) vehicle types. Cities today are filled with many mobility services (e.g. Bird, Lime, Mobike to name just a few).
While micro-mobility pioneers raised billions of dollars in venture capital and have achieved great success, if we look at the transportation landscape, we still see large car ownership.
Mobility Revolution 3.0 – Ride them All: Multimodal MaaS
Today, we finally have a variety of transportation services that can be viable alternatives to private cars (at least in major cities), but in order to use them we need to manage dozens of apps, subscriptions, and multitude of monthly bills.
Managing the relationships with so many MaaS providers has become a huge MesS, which decreases the value of these solutions and causes people to stick to their private cars.
GoTo Global was created by Israeli Car2Go, a mobility operator with 10 years of experience. We realized that in order to facilitate a real revolution, we need to give users the confidence and convenience to be able to go anywhere, anytime. With that, Mobility Revolution 3.0 was born: MMAAS (Multimodal Mobility as a Service).
GoTo Global is one of the MMaaS pioneers with the vision to offer people the confidence to move from point A to point B through its multimodal vehicle sharing service, which offers users bicycles, eco-friendly electric kick-scooters, motorbikes and cars, and even peer-to-peer vehicles. This multimodal mobility service combination provides users with availability, simplicity, and most importantly – peace of mind and the long-awaited "mobility confidence."
Our goal is to provide the new standard for shared mobility, becoming the "go-to" provider for citizens' travel needs, so that they could finally give up their private cars.
Mobility Revolution 3.0 will leverage numerous concepts and technologies, including connected cars, machine learning and AI, and of course autonomous vehicles. The shared mobility market is estimated to reach over $350 billion in just 5 years [2] and presents a huge opportunity not only for entrepreneurs, but also for us to make cities more livable.
It is the beginning of the end of the private vehicle ownership and the beginning of the new shared mobility era.
[1] Fix NYC, Advisory Panel report, Jan 2018
[2] RethinkX 2017, Rethinking Transportation
We ran a series of surveys and customer interviews, which all suggested that the number one reason for this phenomenon was confidence gap. When it comes to commuting it is that simple: we want to be fully assured that we will always have a solution to move smoothly from point A to B.
In the late XV century, John Locke introduced the concept of "human rights," which included the right to life, personal security, equality, freedom of thought, and other basic needs. They were later incorporated into the Bill of Rights and inspired human rights pillars in other countries.
Today, "freedom of movement" can and should be considered a basic human right – the freedom to access secure, convenient, accessible and affordable means to run our lives. However, it seems that thus far we have only partially materialized it. As more people moved into cities and cities expanded, more and more people started using cars to commute. Cars answered all of our needs. Although convenient and reliable, cars also brought negative consequences to our cities: air pollution, accidents, parking burden, and ever-increasing congestion. In fact, inner city car speed often does not exceed 4.7 m/hour [1] . For the past 30 years, we have been living an urban transportation crisis.
New opportunities are born when you have a crisis, and that is exactly what has been happening. Entrepreneurs started to look for ways to provide citizens with fast and affordable alternative transportation solutions that are better fit to the modern urban lifestyle.
Mobility Revolution 1.0 – On-Demand
With the rise of smart phones, the car "moved" to our phone. Now, we can book on-demand mobility services for short-term rentals (e.g Zipcar, Car2Go) and ride hailing trips (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Grab and others).
This revolution created some of the largest Unicorns of 2,000s and changed our mobility habits. Unfortunately, it failed to provide a solution to the transportation crisis, which got even worse! More ride-hailing cars flooded the streets, increasing overall traffic as drivers often float around, waiting for passengers. Congestion and pollution levels did not become lower, but rather intensified.
Yet again, crisis creates opportunities, so more entrepreneurs have moved into disrupting the transportation world.
Mobility Revolution 2.0 – Mobility as a Service (MaaS)
People who own cars typically use them as their main means of transportation. The new mobility entrepreneurs focused on unbundling the car and providing users with a variety of solutions tailored to their immediate commuting needs (e.g. bicycles, electric scooters, motorcycles).
This makes it possible to commute from point A to point B faster, without having to own different (or any) vehicle types. Cities today are filled with many mobility services (e.g. Bird, Lime, Mobike to name just a few).
While micro-mobility pioneers raised billions of dollars in venture capital and have achieved great success, if we look at the transportation landscape, we still see large car ownership.
Mobility Revolution 3.0 – Ride them All: Multimodal MaaS
Today, we finally have a variety of transportation services that can be viable alternatives to private cars (at least in major cities), but in order to use them we need to manage dozens of apps, subscriptions, and multitude of monthly bills.
Managing the relationships with so many MaaS providers has become a huge MesS, which decreases the value of these solutions and causes people to stick to their private cars.
GoTo Global was created by Israeli Car2Go, a mobility operator with 10 years of experience. We realized that in order to facilitate a real revolution, we need to give users the confidence and convenience to be able to go anywhere, anytime. With that, Mobility Revolution 3.0 was born: MMAAS (Multimodal Mobility as a Service).
GoTo Global is one of the MMaaS pioneers with the vision to offer people the confidence to move from point A to point B through its multimodal vehicle sharing service, which offers users bicycles, eco-friendly electric kick-scooters, motorbikes and cars, and even peer-to-peer vehicles. This multimodal mobility service combination provides users with availability, simplicity, and most importantly – peace of mind and the long-awaited "mobility confidence."
Our goal is to provide the new standard for shared mobility, becoming the "go-to" provider for citizens' travel needs, so that they could finally give up their private cars.
Mobility Revolution 3.0 will leverage numerous concepts and technologies, including connected cars, machine learning and AI, and of course autonomous vehicles. The shared mobility market is estimated to reach over $350 billion in just 5 years [2] and presents a huge opportunity not only for entrepreneurs, but also for us to make cities more livable.
It is the beginning of the end of the private vehicle ownership and the beginning of the new shared mobility era.
[1] Fix NYC, Advisory Panel report, Jan 2018
[2] RethinkX 2017, Rethinking Transportation