Replacing private cars in a city with shared mobility services could substantially reduce CO2 emissions as well as traffic volumes while also reducing parking issues.

The report includes feedback from a think tank for transport policy with 57 member countries.

That’s the finding of a new report by the International Transport Forum, a think tank for transport policy with 57 member countries.

Using the city of Lisbon in Portugal as a model, the research expands on two earlier studies that looked at the impact of replacing private cars in a city with shared services and assesses issues around the scaling up of shared mobility services to the whole of the Metropolitan area.

The study found that a full-scale implementation of shared mobility in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) could reduce CO2 emissions by 62% compared to the 53% for the city only while total vehicle kilometres in peak hours reduced by 55% – compared to 2011 – for the metropolitan area with a reduction of 44% for the city alone.

The research – which also envisages new types of shared services such as Shared Taxis or Taxi-Buses for wider metropolitan areas – showed that the total parking space needed for a shared mobility approach reduced by 95% in both the city and metropolitan area and said that the approach on a metropolitan level would mean that access to jobs and other public services would become much better and more equitable.

Researchers added: “The results are very encouraging in the sense that shared mobility solutions can indeed be a powerful catalyst of change for the quality of life in urban areas, including the wider metropolitan agglomerations. It is also relevant that provision of inclusive mobility to all citizens is possible with a very low cost increase (but still at much lower cost levels than those of public transport in the present), thus bringing together significant gains of personal accessibility and of territorial accessibility.”