SAE Publishes First Global Standard on Shared Mobility

November 1, 2018

Jennifer Shuttleworth

As the way people travel is transforming due to demographic shifts, technical advances and environmental concerns, the shared-mobility industry has been challenged with discrepancies in use and definition of terms.

SAE International recognized that the industry was starting to become frustrated by the lack of consensus on shared-mobility terms and definitions — there was immediate need for a standard and the SAE International Shared and Digital Mobility Committee began work on SAE J3163, “Taxonomy and Definitions for Terms Related to Shared Mobility and Enabling Technologies” in December 2017.

Annie Chang, Project Manager for Emerging Mobility, SAE’s Global Ground Vehicle Standards, explained: “The problem with the shared-mobility taxonomy is not that terms and definitions don’t exist; it’s just that there are too many of them,” she told Automotive Engineering. “So, we tried to fix that issue. It was not a matter of coming up with a new term, but agreeing to a set of terms and definitions. The SAE Shared and Digital Mobility Committee is trying to agree on which terms and definitions make sense and how the Committee Members want to tweak them so they agree completely.”

The group quickly grew to more than 100 experts representing the spectrum of the shared-mobility industry. Its roster reflected a different mix than that which SAE is typically accustomed to seeing on a committee.

“You have urban planners and transportation planners and engineers, people from the business side and even people from the law side all looking at shared mobility,” Chang observed.

A panel consisting of a dozen global experts delivered the draft of J3163 to the full committee, which then provided feedback on the draft. This process took place a few times until the committee was ready to ballot.

In September 2018, after just a 10-month process, SAE published J3163, the first globally-developed shared-mobility standard. It defines shared mobility as the shared use of a vehicle, motorcycle, scooter, bicycle or other travel mode, to provide users with short-term access to a transportation mode on an as-needed basis.

J3163 organizes taxonomy into six categories:

Travel modes (e.g. carsharing and bikesharing)
Mobility applications (e.g. mobility tracker apps)
Service models (e.g. peer-to-peer service model)
Operational models (e.g. station-based roundtrip)
Business models (e.g. business-to-business roundtrip)
Deprecated terms (e.g. ridesharing)

Chang detailed various uses for J3163. The taxonomy presents the much-needed shared-mobility nomenclature that may be used by various stakeholders, including regulators, legislators, insurance/underwriting organizations, media, academia, and consumers. It may be used by shared mobility providers and consumers to set consistent expectations of shared mobility services and technologies; J3163 may also be useful during procurement processes, where references to it may help identify and clarify the desired products or services to be procured and offered.

Standardized nomenclature also facilitates cross-sector collaboration, such as public-private partnerships between transit agencies and shared-mobility providers. Finally, J3163 may be incorporated by reference in policies and regulation for clarity of terms used.

“It was really our initial step to open that door to standardization in shared mobility,” Chang said. “A natural next step may include symbols on shared-travel modes now that we have the taxonomy.” She added that standardizing shared-mobility data formats is something the committee might also soon tackle.

Some information in this article was sourced from the white paper https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/wp-0010 written by Dr. Susan Shaheen, Adam Cohen and Annie Chang.