On March 24th, Share4Equity participated in the DUT Knowledge Hub webinar “Strategies to Address Neglected Social Groups and Spatial Contexts”, an online session dedicated to discussing how accessibility and proximity policies can better respond to communities and territories that are often overlooked in mobility planning.
The webinar is part of the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) Knowledge Hubs initiative, which was launched to help projects working on similar urban challenges exchange knowledge and build stronger connections between research and implementation. Rather than treating projects as isolated case studies, the Knowledge Hubs create spaces where researchers, public authorities, mobility operators, and practitioners can compare experiences, identify common barriers, and develop approaches that can be transferred across cities and regions.
The March session focused specifically on groups and places that are frequently absent from accessibility analyses and mobility policies: older adults, caregivers, children, residents of small and medium-sized towns, and people living in transport-poor or marginalized areas. Across the different project presentations, a common question emerged: how can mobility systems respond to needs that are often invisible in conventional transport planning data?
Representing Share4Equity, Zahra Zarabi and Prof. Owen Waygood from Polytechnique Montréal presented their work within WP5 “Transferability and Urban Governance of Shared Mobility for Equity”. Their contribution examined how governance arrangements shape accessibility outcomes in shared mobility systems. Their central argument was that accessibility does not depend only on whether a service exists, but also on the institutional conditions under which it operates.
Drawing from their research, they explained that many shared mobility systems are currently evaluated through indicators such as ridership growth, utilization rates, or network expansion. In practice, this often pushes operators toward dense and profitable urban areas, while peripheral neighborhoods or lower-demand territories remain underserved even when mobility needs are significant. They also discussed how operators frequently rely on usage data alone, which makes it difficult to identify the needs of groups that are already excluded from the system.
Their presentation explored how governance structures can either reinforce or reduce these inequalities. They discussed the importance of creating institutional capacity to identify unmet mobility needs, establishing stronger relationships between operators and community organizations, and developing policy frameworks that evaluate accessibility through equity-oriented criteria rather than purely commercial performance metrics.
Giovanni Lanza from Politecnico di Milano then presented insights from WP3 “Informal and Community-led Shared Options”. His presentation focused on collaborative shared mobility initiatives developed directly within communities, particularly in territories where conventional shared mobility services are limited or economically difficult to operate.
He introduced the idea of collaborative shared mobility as a model where residents are not simply users of a service, but actively participate in organizing, maintaining, and shaping it according to local mobility needs. These initiatives often combine the involvement of communities with the support of municipalities and mobility operators, creating hybrid governance arrangements that differ from traditional public-to-user or business-to-user service models.
One example presented during the webinar was a condominium-based electric car-sharing initiative in the metropolitan area of Genoa. The project brings together residents, a shared mobility operator, and the municipality to provide access to a shared electric vehicle adapted to the realities of a peripheral district. The initiative was presented as a way to improve accessibility in areas where conventional market-driven services struggle to operate, while also strengthening local cooperation around mobility resources.
The presentation also addressed the practical barriers these initiatives face. Questions around regulation, funding, long-term management, and the distribution of responsibilities between citizens and institutions remain central challenges for collaborative mobility models. At the same time, the discussion showed that these experiments can generate forms of social innovation that are difficult to achieve through purely top-down mobility planning.
The webinar was part of the broader exchange taking place within the DUT Knowledge Hubs, where projects are progressively sharing findings across different work areas. Insights from Share4Equity WP1, WP2, and WP4 will also be presented in upcoming DUT Knowledge Hub sessions on the 11th of May