The emerging drive-sharing business

: a glimpse of the future

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore car and scooter sharing services, one of the fastest growing and most recent shared mobility services respectively. The main goal is to analyse user’s demographic characteristics, motivations and some of its impacts throughout the time. Due to the different business models, the one-way under free-floating scheme was the selected one to study. In Portugal, more precisely in Lisbon, these services are starting to emerge and gain popularity and as a result, this thesis will analyse how the Portuguese market is responding to this new trend through a comparison with other countries. In-depth interviews and an online questionnaire were conducted. It was concluded that Portuguese users are predominately young, well educated and with relatively lower levels of income. They also revealed to mainly use their own private vehicle as a mean of transportation. Regarding usage motivations, convenience was their greatest motive followed by using as an alternative to public transportation and by interest and curiosity. Nevertheless, only the motive of using as an alternative to public transports shown to be statistically significant to use the services more often. Regarding the impacts, it was verified that some users of private ownership vehicles are reducing their usage, are becoming more aware of their mobility costs, although a disagreement in buying and having a vehicle was verified.

Date of Award	2 Mar 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Miguel Rita (Supervisor)