"Autonomy", le festival de la nouvelle mobilité, à la Grande Halle du Parc de la Villette, à Paris, vient de s'achever. On y a notamment testé la trottinette électrique pliable qui roule à 20 km/heure, la draisienne autonome et le casque de réalité virtuelle proposé par la SNCF pour visiter Lyon. Surtout, on pourra prolonger le plaisir de la découverte par la lecture des trois articles que The Economist vient de consacrer à la nouvelle mobilité en moins d'un mois... preuve s'il en est de l'importance et de la vitesse des changements dans le secteur de la mobilité.
Les deux articles de début septembre sont plus spécifiquement consacrés à Uber, et notamment à son ambition de devenir leader de la fourniture de services de mobilité dans le monde du véhicule autonome. L'auteur montre bien que les possibilités de succès sont aussi fortes que les risques d'échec (un enjeu principal étant l'évolution des réglementations et taxations publiques, mais aussi la menace de concurrents). Mais dans tous les cas, le monde de la mobilité et la forme des villes vont profondément évoluer (il serait possible de diviser par 10 le besoin de véhicules, et aujourd'hui un quart de la surface de certaines villes américaines est occupé par la voiture !!) .

Extraits :

Today ride-hailing accounts for less than 4% of all kilometres driven globally, but that will rise to more than 25% by 2030.

An OECD study that modelled the use of self-driving cars in Lisbon found that shared autonomous vehicles could reduce the number of cars needed by 80-90%. As car ownership declines, the enormous amount of space devoted to parking - as much as a quarter of the area of some American cities- will be avalaible for parks and housing instead.

Carmarkers lack Uber's experience as a service provider, or its deep knwoledge of demand patterns and customer behaviour.

Unlike Apple or Google, it is singularly focused on transport; unlike incumbent carmakers, it does not have a legacy car-manufacturing business to protect.

Investor's bullishness is bolstered by Uber's position at the intersection of three linked disruptive trends. First it is the emergence of asset-light business models. The cost of expanding is far lower for a startup that does not own its own cars or consider its drivers employees. Second is the shift to the sharing economy, which underlies the sucess of peer-to-peer services;a system that lets people do as much or as little as they like attracts workers. The third is that consumers, especially young consumers, are increasingly happy to pay for access to things, rather than own them outright.

Uber is investing heavily in developing its own mapping capabilities by buying assets, including the mapping startup deCarta, and hoovering up talent from Google.

L'article de début octobre est quant à lui centré plus spécifiquement sur le "transport comme un service". Il s'appuie notamment sur l'exemple de la start up finoise MaaS (Mobility as a service), au coeur selon l'hedomadaire d'un des plus ambitieux projets à Helsinki. Alors qu'il existe déjà de nombreuses applications qui permettent de conseiller le meilleur trajet en combinant offre de transport public et offre de mobilité individuelle, l'enjeu est de permettre d'effectuer effectivement le trajet de manière intégrée, avec notamment un système de paiement unique.

Extraits :

Residents will be able to travel quickly door-to-door within the city by using an app that mixes and matches a variety of public and private means of transport. Several such schemes are due to start this year. If they succeed they could do for personal mobility what Airbnb and Spotify have done for accomodation and music; turn it into a service, accessed and paid for on demand.

But planning a journey is one thing: making it another. After getting advice on their routes travellers have always had to find their own way to a bus stop or train station, or call a cab. Payment and booking systems have generally been separate for each leg of a journey, and the "last mile" between mass transit and final destination has not been covered at all. Services such as Whim aim to change all this: removing the guesswork, combining the various options in the most efficient and cost-effective ways, ang getting the traveller seamlessly from door to door.

M. Hietanen (Maas' CEO) certainly has big plans. The Whim app includes pay-as-you-go "multi-modal" packages that bundle monthly travel requirements at a single price. For perhaps €95 ($106) amonth it might offer free city-wide public transport, 100km of local taxi use, 500km of car rental and 1,500jm on national public transport. He thinks that aiming mobility services at city-dwellers is too limited, and wants to integrate regional and national trains - as well as rural services, where on demand buses and ride-sharing could prove handier than scheduled buses, whic often travel half-empty.

Tous ces éléments sont au coeur de notre étude sur les nouveaux modèles économiques urbains (ici), dont une version synthétique sera rendue publique courant décembre. Ci-dessous un schéma de travail sur les recompositions de la chaîne de mobilité. Version simplifiée à suivre !

A lire également notre précédent billet sur le positionnement de Google comme "agrégateur" de mobilité : ici.

Sources :
Uberworld - The Economist - September 3rd 2016
From zero to seventy (billion) - The Economist - September 3rd 2016
It starts with a single app - The Economist - October 1st 2016