#TIL: What is shared mobility, really?

by Jagriti Arora

Seeing is believing!

If one doesn’t see the asset sharing happen, did it even happen? Turns out, it did. Let’s take shared mobility, for instance. Many people (including the author, a couple of months ago) believe that Shared mobility is ‘sharing a vehicle among users concurrently’. Shared mobility, however, is when transport services and resources are shared among users even one after another.

Also, the idea of ride-sharing has been around for almost a decade! Yellow taxi cabs, the forebearer of shared mobility, appeared in around 1907. By the 1990s, the efforts to establish real-time ridesharing were started, but they remained stymied due to lack of fast internet communication. Even a decade later — in the early 2000s, next-day ridesharing was considered a fast setup and was done over the phone. It was only in the late 2000s that ride-sharing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, launched.

Today I learnt (TIL) is a weekly series by OMI that brings you interesting nuggets of information that you didn’t know you needed.