Share North
Shared Mobility Rocks 2022 – SHARE-North goes out with a bang!
The international Shared Mobility Rocks Symposium took place in Bremen’s “Centre for Automobile Culture and Mobility”, a provocative choice for the venue of a conference focused on reducing car-use and car-ownership. However, this was precisely the goal of the event: to be provocative and to pose uncomfortable questions like, “Will shared mobility ever become mainstream?”, “Do (privately) owned cars belong in a museum as a thing of the past?”, and “Is it fair, reasonable or even effective that only 22% of people working in the European transport sector are female?” (the obvious answer to the last question is, of course, “NO!”).
The unconventional symposium for representatives of urban and transport planning, politics, research, mobility service providers and consulting companies focused on the advantages of shared forms of transport – from car sharing and bike sharing to carpooling, shared micro-mobility and mobility stations – individually as well as a means for solving transport problems in urban and rural areas.
“Bremen has long relied on car-sharing as a means of reducing stationary traffic, because here a car-sharing vehicle replaces 16 private cars! Other modes such as bike-sharing and shared cargo bikes, together with public transport, can also represent an attractive, convenient and inexpensive alternative to your own car.”, said Dr. Maike Schaefer, Bremen’s Minister for Climate Protection, the Environment, Mobility, Urban and Housing Development during her opening address to the symposium’s over 230 attendees. Participants from over 20 countries attended the symposium, including Norway, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom as well as the USA, Mexico and Japan. The deputy mayor of the Belgian City of Ghent, Filip Watteeuw, was the keynote speaker who opened the day with his inspiring presentation on “How to Become a Shared Mobility Rock Star as a City!”.
The featured mobility experts, including, of course, the SHARE-North project partners themselves, offered dozens of presentations and sessions with good examples for shared mobility policies and practices from across the European continent. The event also included excursions on foot, by bike and with the electric “Town Musician Express” to sites across the Bremen that have successfully integrated car-sharing and other forms of sustainable mobility in different and innovative ways and make them more accessible to the population – from on-street mobility hubs (Bremen’s famous “mobil.punkte”) to shared mobility integration into social housing projects.
The presentations as well as selected photos from the symposium are available on the Shared Mobility Rocks website.
The international conference was organised jointly by the City of Bremen, the Belgian NGOs Mpact and Autodelen.net (creators of the Shared Mobility Rocks brand and symposium) and highlighted the many accomplishments of the SHARE-North project and its partners.
These highlights included the successful launch of the mobil.punkt, mobipunt, mobihub aka mobility hub concept across the North Sea region. What began as a transport strategy in the city of Bremen has been expanded upon and communicated fantastically by the SHARE-North partners since 2017, so that it spread like wild fire and lead to mobil.punkte in Bergen and other Norwegian cities, mobihubs in Belgium and the Netherlands and has inspired wide-scale mobility hub policies in the UK as well as the development of follow-up EU-funded projects! Another major success of the project that features many practical examples is the culmination of nearly six years of work: The Planner’s Guide to the Shared Mobility Galaxy. The comprehensive guide to the types and impacts of shared transport modes for planners and decision makers.
Interested in viewing other project highlights? Take a look at the posters featured at Shared Mobility Rocks below that summarise some of the SHARE-North project partners’ favourite accomplishments from the project.
Interested in finding out what comes after SHARE-North, aside from a strong continuing bond between the original project consortium? Click here!
