Governing Shared Mobility: A comparison of the policy goals, governance instruments, and social outcomes achieved in the cities of Bogotá, Paris, and Los Angeles

The topic of this thesis is the governance of shared mobility, particularly form factors such as ride-hailing and shared bicycles and scooters that have been typically deployed and operated by private-sector companies. The thesis presents the results and analyses of three case studies that exemplify different governance approaches for these services: Bogotá, Colombia, and the use of an umbrella regulation to govern the deployment of ride-hailing services, Paris, France, and the use of non-legally binding codes of good conduct with private operators to govern the deployment of shared moped, bicycle, and scooter services, and Los Angeles, USA, and the use of an operational permit to govern the deployment of shared scooter services. The analyses focused on understanding the goals pursued by these local governments, the governance tools used, and the outcomes achieved when policymakers attempted to govern these technological services. The thesis concludes that cities are pursuing a wide diversity of goals when governing shared mobility deployments. These goals are guided by local circumstances, but they rarely coincide with what the academic literature proposes as the goals that should be pursued by transport policy. It further concludes that there are no preferred policy instruments used by cities to govern shared mobility, and that instrument choice is mainly constrained by the context in which the cities are embedded. Free from contextual constraints, city governments attempt to balance the legitimacy of the instruments against their effectiveness. Ultimately, the thesis proposes plausible causal pathways to explain the observed outcomes in the case of Los Angeles. It proposes that the availability of shared mobility vehicles, their characteristics, and the increased oversight provided by the government for these new modes can explain why outcomes related to equity, road safety, power, and innovation were observed. These explanatory ‘mechanisms’ can be used to improve future iterations of programmes to better govern the deployment of new technological services in the transport sector.
The thesis makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of the governance of the transport sector. It provides new empirical evidence that enhances our understanding of extant theories of how local policymakers and public practitioners select goals and policy instruments to address emerging technological developments in the transport sector. It also provides novel empirical evidence on the causality of transport governance interventions aimed at achieving public policy goals. The thesis also makes theoretical contributions to the academic literature, most notably, it creates a framework for understanding the term “shared mobility,” and it showcases a practical approach to exploring causality when evaluating policy interventions through the philosophy of science of Critical Realism.