Sustainable development assessment of incentive-driven shared on-demand mobility systems in rural settings

In the light of the sustainable development goals, a set of operationalizable criteria quantifying societal benefits versus costs is needed to prepare for the introduction of an incentive-driven, high adoption shared on-demand mobility service in a rural transportation area. Aiming to reduce still-existing uncertainty about the impacts of a market entry and to balance substantial monetary incentives for suppliers of pooled rides with the progress in net GHG emission reduction and accessibility gain, the framework is applicable at the transactional and/or aggregate level. The presented set of indicators is decision-oriented, and applicable both at the transactional and macro level. Scenarios and user choice situations for two regulatory options of demand responsive transport—one in line with the current legislation in Germany, avoiding overlap with existing fixed-route scheduled public transport and one not strictly complementary which assumes direct competition—are formalized. By the help of a case study, the outcome of the different organizational models at three levels of incentivization can be systematically compared. The implementation effort of the assessment method is examined in view of the forthcoming sustainability compliance reporting in this sector. A system-optimal constrained public private DRT deployment offers the opportunity of a reduction of uneconomic routes and parallel services upon selection of eligible rides. As shown, a crowding out of existing, publicly financed offerings in an unsaturated mobility market should not be the primary concern. At the contrary, resorting to supply-side incentives, a proportion of the high volume of solo car trips could be consolidated while levels of service improve in total. However, this may be associated with considerable expense, as demonstrated by the quantity structure of the provided case study.