Shared mobility rocks! Bringing shared e-bikes, cars, scooters and buses into the mix

Shared Mobility Architect Sandra Phillips believes in connecting the dots between shared transportation modes to help people get around safely and quickly, while reducing dependence on privately owned automobiles. Movmi, her BC-based consulting firm, has worked with communities from Switzerland to Vancouver, and from Moncton NB to Portland, Nelson, Osoyoos, and New York  state — helping communities structure and finance shared cargo bikes,  e-scooters, cars, and even electric autonomous on-demand buses to enable shared mobility at every scale.

Check out Movmi: Bringing shared mobility visions to life — HERE

Movmi's project 40 miles north of New York City is in the Village of Ossining, NY — learn more HERE.

Future Mobility expert Jennifer Dungs also talks about Ossining in this WEBINAR on Lower Density and Bike Revolution, moderated by Sandra and including Kassandra McCleery from Copenhagenize and Ashley Finch from Atlanta.

Find out about the Sparrow shared scooter project in Kelowna HERE

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Welcome to Bike Sense, the BC Cycling Coalition's podcast where we talk about all things related to cycling advocacy, education, and safety in BC. I'm your host, Peter Latin, the chair of the board of the BC Cycling Coalition. I hope you enjoy the show. My guest today is Sandra Phillips. She calls herself a shared mobility architect. She's the founder of M O B, which is a VC-based consultancy that's helped bring shared mobility to communities and cities in over 70 projects for.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Thank you, Peter, and thank you for the invitation to join the podcast. So, what is shared mobility? It's essentially any vehicle that you don't own, but you share in your community. It doesn't matter to us whether that's uh a bike or uh a car, or actually, in fact, even buses can be part of the share mobility. Uh I always call public transit transport the big brother or big sister, whatever you prefer, of all these small share mobility modes uh that have been popping up the last couple years. Um now about myself, I'm you may detect a tiny accent. I'm a transplant from Switzerland. Uh moved to Canada in 2008 permanently, but have been coming here since 2001, on and off. Um and so I have uh a background from a country that is very small, everything is very connected. Having said that, I grew up in a rural part of Switzerland where even though we have this image and you can go on a train anywhere, that was true when I was probably like 10. Um, up until I was 10, there was a train from my little tiny town, village, uh, that connected all the way to Zurich if I wanted to. But in my high school year, that train was canceled. And so we cycled basically to school and to the closest train station where we got our bikes stolen, just like today. Um but yeah, I had this like connected network, and then at some point I lived above a train station um in Switzerland, like the SBB rented out their old train stations, um, I guess to people who wanted to live. Um, and so I rented with a number of friends, and I lived above, and there was also a car sharing station right outside. So I had everything a bike, a car sharing station, and the train right below me. Um and then I moved to Canada, and people were jokingly saying within a year you have a car, and I did not have a car. Um, in fact, I'm quite stubborn. The first car I got is because I have a little kid and I had to get to daycare, and it was not safe to bike anymore, or I didn't feel safe with her on the back along the highway.

SPEAKER_02 3:22

Um Do you have a car now, Sandra?

SPEAKER_00 3:24

I do. That's what I'm um I do since last year. It's the first time that I have a car.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

And how do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Oh, I was like not very happy. Let's just put it that way. My my husband was like, your entire soul just got crushed. You thought you could make it through life without owning one, and it did not quite work. We moved to the Sunshine Coast, uh seashelt, and our daughter couldn't get into daycare right up the road, so we had to drive her to Half Moon Bay. I tried it once on our I have an electric cargo bike, a rad wagon. I did it once, and there were two semis passing me with her on the back, and that was the end of that. I was like, not doing that. I am too scared. Um, not maybe less so if it was just me, but with her on the back, I was too scared. Um, and there's not very good lighting. If you know the Sunshine Coast Highway, there's not very good lighting. So in the winter it's dark and hard to see some of the corners around the corners.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

So well, let's get into that because you are somewhat typical of many people in BC living in a uh a rural community, probably not well served by transit, and seeking alternatives to owning a car, but here you are, let's say, trapped into having to own your car. Could you describe if you had your dream and all your knowledge of shared mobility options, what would the Sunshine Coast look like from a dream shared mobility point of view?

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Uh-huh. That's a very good question. Um, so I will actually say before I go into your question, I'm gonna give you a little bit of like how we picked where we live. Because me being in transportation now for almost 13 years, the one thing I always do is map out all the infrastructure around my house. So we picked the place where the school was literally walking distance, we picked a place where we had sidewalks and lights, because I didn't want to live somewhere there wasn't that. We have a bike lane literally starting outside of our house and it goes right into Seasheld, unfortunately to have Moon Bay. Um, and I have a bus stop literally around the corner. But that is because I made a conscious choice that that's where we wanted to live, somewhere where we had all of that. Okay. Now, what I would love for the Sunshine Coast is for all the people to have this. Because I recognize West Seasheld, which is the neighborhood we live in, and it's a newer, um newer newer developed area, about 20 years old, they have made an effort to do that. Um, and in fact, uh Seasheld actually is connecting um the school, the elementary school with the high school with um a protected bike lane as well. So Seasheld is putting efforts in, but it's just pockets. The Sunshine Coast has pockets of this, but a vast majority of people, and if you live in Half Month Bay or Roberts Creek, you have very limited access to infrastructure, to lighting, which seems so trivial, but it's actually so important in a rainy winter season. Um yeah, so I would love if we just could build this out. And then once we have the infrastructure built out, I think then I would love to add more services. So we have a very small embryonic car share. Um, the closest one to me is at City Hall, which is on the electric bike, a 10-minute bike ride, so not too bad, but it's one. So if that's taken, there isn't any other option. Um yeah. And then if I could really add uh something that is a bit on the innovative side, and I know BC Transit is experimenting with that, at least in in the Okanagan Valley, is the DRT, a demand-responsive transit. Essentially, I always describe it as you put carpooling on a small van and bus, and now you have more reach. It more coverage, you don't necessarily move more people, but you can cover a bigger area. Because as I said, I have a bus stop here, but if you're in half moon bay, you have to walk quite far, and you sit basically on a dark road with no light again, on a chair that somebody from the neighborhood just donated to sit on. Um so yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:49

So uh you you said that uh in some communities you have helped set up uh shared mobility. Um you mentioned Moncton is a recent one, a small-ish Canadian town. Um, what did you do there and how would active transportation fit into their shared mobility program?

SPEAKER_00 8:11

So Moncton is an interesting one because they're actually at the point of evaluating whether or not they came to us because they were evaluating whether or not they should bring car share to Moncton and whether or not they should do it themselves, or if they should essentially allow a provider uh to come. Now, for the Canadian landscape, there's really if you're in the Metro Vancouver area, Victoria, you will have heard of Modo, the car co-op. Um, been around now. I have to be make sure 25 years. Um quite a large fleet, diverse fleet. Now, if you go east of the border of Alberta, the I guess the equivalent is Cominotto. They started in Montreal. Now, Kominoto has made it um one of their pillars is going to more rural communities. But to make that work, there has to be an anchor user, which generally is the municipality. So there's some funding basically coming from the municipality towards the car share so they can start. Because it's small, right? Um, viability of uh of this. If you only have one car, to my earlier point in Seashelt, you have one car, that one is gone, then it's not reliable, then people will not sign up, right? So they want to start with six. And they reached out to us and said, okay, you have done this in a lot of different places, you understand the financials. What should we do? Should we go with Kominotto and basically fund it for a portion of time and get a revenue share back, or should we just stand it up ourselves? Um, and so the recommendation that we've given them is it's much smarter to start with somebody who is Kominotto has all the software, has all the you know, support system in place. Much smarter, also lower cost, even though there's going to be some um, I guess, cross-funding initially, than if they want to stand this up themselves. Uh, I've seen enough of those, we stand three cars up ourselves and then it fails because nobody signs up. Um, because it's actually a lot of work in the in the background. So now to your question, how do you now tie active transportation in? Well, one of um one of the really smart ways, I think, is to start thinking not just I'm gonna do car share, and then we have public transport, and then what are we gonna do with the bikes, but actually think about can you bring everything together? Like, could the car share be close to the bus stop, which is where people who don't have a car need to most likely go or come from? And could you have active transportation anchored around that as well? Like, for instance, something simple as even just a bike rack next to the car share would be very useful. In my context, in Seashelt, I have a bike rack across the street of the car sharing car at the library. But the second car in Roberts Creek, there's no bike rack close by. So something very simple, but I have to get myself somehow there, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:19

Does that include having a bike rack on a bus and or having the bike racks like like they do in some of the cars in Vancouver on the roof of the car, which I don't know how you get an e-bike up there, but I like the idea.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Yeah, um, I think having bike racks on buses are great. Having said that, if um it requires a bit of strength to lift the bike up, and the same with the ones on the roofs um of the Evos in the city. I think the ones on a in the car sharing context, having bike racks on the roof is really if you want to encourage people to go to a destination and then let's say do mountain biking. If you just want to encourage people to have a way, or if you just want to make sure people have a way to connect the dots, like from my house to the car share car, and then I'm taking that and come back, just make then you just need essentially something at the station, more so than on top of the roof. And that's what really Evo uh's use case is. Um, I mean, their big their brand is built around the lifestyle in BC, right? Which they have not only bike racks, but they also have ski racks in between. So it's all about what you're doing when you have the car. Can you now go on an adventure? Where in most cases in in smaller towns, when car sharing starts out, you're really just replacing the car for like, I need to go and see my friends, my family, I need to go to a doctor's appointment, I need to go shopping. Less so I'm going on an adventure and I want to go mountain biking. To be very honest, I have that in my in my backyard. I can just go there um to go mountain biking on the coast.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

I think that's typical of a lot of communities in BC that the mountain biking is readily accessible. Now you did some work in Nelson, I believe. How does their car share? What did you do there and and how did they get involved and how is it working out?

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Nelson is a is a big bit of a unique um case. So I'm trying to think of how it's best explained. So they had a car share. Um they're, I'm gonna call them beaters, but that's not really what they are. But they're older cars, they're really geared towards what you're doing in Nelson, okay? And they're, you know, you may take it on a road that's not as well uh maintained. So they wanted to have cars that can handle that. Um so that's how they started. And then a couple of years ago, they started to think about okay, can we electrify it? Which is a real challenge for any car share for a number of reasons. One is rebate, the other thing is infrastructure, and infrastructure definitely was a challenge in Nelson.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

Um this one in Nelson was run by the municipality, or was it?

SPEAKER_00 14:05

No, it no, it's a not-for-profit. It's run independently. Yeah, it's run independently. They work very close, and I actually you just prompted me. There's uh some really interesting work that the city of Nelson has done around regulatory framework that supports the uh car share now. But they really were actually looking at the larger area in the Kootenies to see if they could electrify. And so, what in the end they decided, because they cannot stand up the infrastructure, they can not acquire the cars because they're too expensive and the rebates only apply for a certain uh number of vehicles. So, what they actually did is they blended traditional car chain with peer-to-peer. So if you're familiar with Touro, um, or if you're not familiar with that, Airbnb, think Airbnb. Somebody has an electric car, doesn't need it all the time, now puts it into their fleet, and now you can access this when you need it. And it's quite, I will tell you, it's probably the most innovative approach I have ever seen a small community take to this electrification problem. Um now the other thing that they managed to do is uh to get City Council to look at their regulatory framework and see if they can support Carshare in a better way. And they actually mirrored uh to a certain extent what what the city of Vancouver and Victoria have done, where CarShare gets a special exemption from some of the parking um rules to encourage people. Uh, you know, it it becomes easier then than your normal car to move around in town. Um, again, for a very small community, it's they've they've probably done most that I know. Like otherwise, it's the Victorious, the Calgaries, the city of Vancouver, right? Montreal, that has these kind of very forward-thinking policies, um, less so in a small community. I think if I ask Seashelt what they would be doing for a car share, they would be looking at me like, why would I even care about that?

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Um so let's talk about that. Where does the incentive for car sharing come from, typically in your experience in these communities? Is it uh people, I don't know, drivers who want a better deal don't want to have to buy a car, or is it someone at the municipal staff or politicians who say we need this in our community? And how do they justify the expense and decide to go ahead?

SPEAKER_00 16:33

It's actually often a group of dedicated citizens, like so many things, just like in active infrastructure, um, that really want to change it. I would say in most cases that's where it starts. And then depending on how good their relationship is or how good they are with advocacy work, they'll get the city involved. Um and most cities have some sort of mandate around reducing um, you know, greenhouse gas emissions, reducing kilometers. Pretty much most municipalities in Canada have something. And so if you have a group, a dedicated group of citizens who is first in that, they'll piggyback on it. And that's kind of what happened in Moncton. And then they got the year of the municipality. To make it successful, it's really we always say you need an anchor user. It doesn't matter if it's a municipality, that's the easiest one. You know, they all have fleet. If you can get staff to use the car sharing fleet, it's easy. But you can also have yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

Just on the municipal fleet.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

Uh is the model there that the municipality typically has a fleet of vehicles and then they their staff uses them, and then after hours they make them available for use for the public?

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Different, different in different communities. Personally, and move me's work. We generally recommend not to make it exclusive for staff during office hour and then open it to the public because you don't have enough utilization. And for all shared services, whether it's bike share or car share, you need lots of people using it lots of time to make the investment worthwhile. Um, so wouldn't say that. Um, but there is communities who do that. So, to you answer your question, yes and no. I wouldn't recommend it. Lots of municipalities push for it because they're cross-funding it. Um, and then two years in, they realize actually they're locking out people who really need it during the day and then open it up slowly over time.

SPEAKER_02 18:36

Um can you talk a little bit about bike share? We've talked about cars. Yes. And bike share people typically think of as being useful and feasible in more dense, built-up urban areas. Are there thresholds for when a bike share becomes feasible in a smaller community?

SPEAKER_00 18:57

So I think you have to start thinking. So typically or historically, bike share was a traditional pedal bike, right? And that makes a lot of sense for urban dance course. Now, if you start thinking about electric bikes or even electric cargo bikes, all of a sudden it becomes more attractive for smaller communities. Because to your point, and I'm going to use CSHET again, in Seashelt doesn't make sense to stand up a bike share, a traditional pedal bike share. But what does make sense is an electric bike share. And I actually in uh there is a project out of outside of New York, and I'm blanking on the name of the town right now, small town. And what they did is it's a library, and it's next to the regular library, it's a cargo bike, electric bike share library. So you come there, so it's not distributed all across town, but it's there, and you can book them out for longer periods. So it's not just, you know, like how most bike shares are when you need it for the 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and then you need to find a dock again. It's really like you're getting to take it for a week, two weeks at a time, even a month at a time. Um, to try partly is the thought is you try it out, you see if that really changes your behavior, if you really want it still. They have different models in that library. Do you still want that? And then either you buy it, um, or you just realize, you know, I just occasionally want it and go back to the bike library. And that actually has been quite uh it's not just um why can I not? It's like this very Is it Troy uh no? Troy and Albany is where we're working with a public transit operator who is in adding car share and bike share to their offering, but the bike library is Okinawian or something, it's a very um weird name that I can't remember.

SPEAKER_02 21:02

We can put it in the notes for this.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

I was gonna say I'll find it, I'll drop it over. Um, and there's a bunch of those actually popping up in in Europe too. Now, the other way to bring bike share um or just electric micromobility to small communities is what we've done with Sparrow. Now, Sparrow is a scooter company, but we basically model that after a bike share program, a cargo bike share program in Switzerland. We've teamed up with hotels, and so at the hotels, when you come, it's for a Soyuz, Oliver, they have a lot of cars coming in with tourists, traffic triples, they don't want them to drive around. So at the hotels, you park your car and now you have a scooter, an electric scooter, kick scooter to move around. Now, could you do that with a bike? Yes, exactly the same. And they have now expanded over time. Initially, it was just tied to hotels, now they've expanded to local shops. So at the local shops, there is also a station, and that you can do that. You can do in any small community. Um, the project I mentioned from Citron is an electric cargo one, and it has bikes actually in the neighboring community where I grew up, which is very small. It's about 10,000 people, just like Seasheld. Um, they have two stations at the grocery stores. Uh, they're electric cargo by stations. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:34

Fantastic. Now you mentioned the transit authority, and I know that your work involves the so-called ecosystem of transportation, all the different modes, and somehow keeping them all coordinated or or synchronized and working together. Do you have any interest from BC Transit in any of this work?

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Yes, we do.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

And what are they thinking? Um what are you thinking for them?

SPEAKER_00 23:01

I would say um possibly because we have better relationship with Translink. Um, on Translink side, there's been a lot more uh of this integration work going on, possibly also because in Metro Vancouver you have more service offerings that you need to stitch together, right? Um having said that, now that communities like Victoria, um, I actually even Seasheld, even though it's only one car and then Roberts Creek, which is another car, like could we tie this back into BC Transit? They have a multimodal app, they have a transit out of Montreal, which helps with your trip planning. Could we add it there, surface it there? That would be wonderful, I think. Because if you come off the ferry and take the bus, and then they're like, now I'm in Seashell for a week. I'd rather, you know, I want to go, I don't know, I want to drive up to the Schukum Chuk Falls. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just take the car share? Right now it's not integrated at all. And we've had a bit of a hard time uh getting their attention, partly because their point was there isn't much service outside of Metro Vancouver, but that's not true. It's just a lot more smaller and local, like Sparrow is local in the Okanagan. You have another one in the Tofino area, um, you have Victoria, like it's a bit more fragmented uh to stitch it together, but could be done. Transit, the app they're using, has done it in other municipalities. They have integrated them. And even just surfacing, right? Even just showing that this option is there would be so helpful.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Absolutely. Now you talked, uh you mentioned regulatory frameworks that municipalities could could do. And I think you mentioned that they preferred parking for shared vehicles and so on. What are other things that a municipality could do to enable these options to come into being?

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Well, there's a few things. One is if they're the anchor user, and even if they're not, if their staff adopts it, people are like, huh, my counselor uses it. Hmm, I should let loose look into it. So essentially be the ambassador for these programs, yeah. Set an example, be the lead with example, exactly. That's one. Um the second one is as I said, thinking about where to place infrastructure. It's often left to the private operators to find places. And what they do is they go where they get an agreement. Now, if you get city staff who is on the planning side to work together, you could really strategically place them. This is what has been uh this is part of the reason why it's so successful in Metro Vancouver area. Because at some point every single Sky Train station got car sharing and bike sharing stations, not just car sharing, bike sharing stations next to it. But for that you need uh the municipal support. You will never get access to this. Um, so you need the staff on the planning side to at least think about it with you. So that's a second one. Um, then you can do regulatory framework like incentives, like if you take parking away, you give it to share mobility, or you're giving um you're incentivizing. Let's just say you don't you get like the Metro Vancouver or Victoria example, where if you use a car share car, you can park in any residential neighborhood, something that is as a private car owner, you are not allowed. So now you're incentivizing that shift. So there's that. Um, I'm trying to think. And then the last one is, you know, cross-funding, finding some public-private partnership, um, just like the Moncton one or the bike share one. Most bike shares operate on that, right? Having some sort of way, and then there's a stake in it. There's also a stake in the success of it.

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Sandra, we're running out of time. I wanted to just touch on in your website, you talk about a project in in a smallish town, 33,000 person town in Switzerland, where they have an automated on-demand bus. And is this something in our future or is that just some freak one-of kind of experiment?

SPEAKER_00 27:24

So those experiments popped up a couple of years ago everywhere. So it wasn't just, you know, that little mountain town. It was probably one of the first ones, but in Switzerland they popped up all across. Um, and in fact, we even had uh one in Surrey and one in Vancouver run as a test. Um, one ran along to Olympic Village between Grammar Island and Olympic Village, that track, just to see. Now it's very cute, we took it, it's very exciting, it's very like feels very futuristic. I will say in most cases, people haven't quite figured out the use case. It's it's cute and it's small. And I mean, in the in the um example in Switzerland, the Sion one, it goes around uh the town from the train station and it goes to all the points of interest that people want to go to. So it actually had a bit of purpose, but it's it's more of a, I would say it's more of a futuristic tech fun thing to try out. Personally, I think if we ever if we think autonomous future and autonomous vehicles, my preference would be let's build this out and figure how we do that before we start making every bloody car on the road autonomous. Um I think then we have shared, we could make it electric and we could make it autonomous, and I think that would be you know a win-win for everyone, rather than um making every single car autonomous. But at the moment it's more of a plaything, futuristic. Let's see how you feel about it once you're in it, uh, than real life applications.

SPEAKER_02 29:02

Well, it sounds like, as with so many things, this is a case of just doing the hard work and testing something out, proving the case, and uh building on your strengths and examples. And uh I'm encouraged to hear all these ones that you're mentioning around BC. I didn't know about these. And I hope that people listening to this podcast will get some ideas and inspiration from what you're doing. We'll post your um contacts in the in the show notes. And is there anything else you'd like to add before we sign off? Messages to communities that are thinking about this or advocacy groups that are thinking about it.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Uh maybe the one thing is it always seems like only the big cities can do something like this. There is by now a lot of examples of smaller, you gotta be very focused. And you've got to be smart. You can't do exactly the same thing that a big city can do. But there's definitely models that have worked, not only in North America, but also in small towns in Europe. Like we always think of Europe as being mega cities, but there is tons of rural areas in France, in Germany, in Switzerland, in the UK, and they're all experimenting with the same thing. So there's lots of models, I think, that we can copy. We don't just have to look at Paris and Vancouver and New York and get all discouraged. So this is maybe my shout-out. Like small can still work. Just got to do it a little bit differently.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

Sandra, thank you so much. Sandra Phillips, the founder of Move Me and an international consultant on shared mobility of all kinds. If you have ideas of what we could be discussing on future podcasts, please send them to us or any reaction or comments about this one. And uh just to let you know that we are thinking, we're working on future podcasts about cycling on the BC ferries and ways to shift the massive amount of billions of dollars that we spend on highway and car improvements to some of these more um uh uh affordable and efficient and planet-friendly alternatives. So thank you so much, Sandra. Look forward to keeping in touch.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

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SPEAKER_01 32:03

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SPEAKER_02 32:07

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