Abstract
Shared mobility has potential to improve access and increase wellbeing for low-income populations and older people. Shared mobility involves short term rental or loan of vehicles, and can include cars, bikes, and scooters. Lowering the per-trip costs of transport, increasing the range of transport options to which people have access, and increasing the use of active transport modes should (in theory) reduce the number of people who struggle to access important amenities and social opportunities. There is, however, little international evidence of this happening and minimal discussion of the social processes involved in the emergence of outcomes from shared mobility schemes. The ACTIVATION research project is working with social housing tenants and retirement village residents who have recently gained access to shared mobility. This presentation proposes a novel combination of a practice architecture perspective and a mobility biography method to try to understand how mobility practices are influenced by access to shared mobility. It asks whether assembling these different theoretical, methodological, and empirical elements results in a difficult to disentangle mess, or a productive mash-up that will help us to devise better approaches to shared mobility schemes.