How collaboration between vendors shape the future of mobility?

I have repeatedly been asked the question: what do shared mobility vendors gain from sharing data and collaborating in an open network? I want to address this question to help our supporters understand how and why VeloxChain’s core technology is so relevant.

The sharing economy today

Why pay through the nose for something when it can be rented cheaply from a stranger? Technology advances have transformed the sharing economy to an “informal” economy, of which has been widely adopted in several sectors, including transport. Inexpensive apps have enabled sharing mobility networks to expand rapidly and achieve economies of scale. Anyone with a credit card and phone can easily book a ride-hailing trip or locate and rent a nearby sharing bike/scooter in cosmopolitan cities. The trust factor, which has long been a controversial topic, has now been addressed by peer ratings, business and liability regulations and third-party verifications.

The benefits of shared mobility

With such benefits, many apps have launched into the market and grown exponentially. But city governments are just starting to grapple with its impacts. They are yet to regulate what needs to be shared by whom to achieve win-win sustainability goals, not to mention how to govern the relationship between commuters, vendors and other involved parties.

The struggles of a centralized system

While users can realize the marginal benefits through reduced costs and availability, their personal data is being at risk for commercialization. Dock-less bikes or free-floating scooters and cars are not distributed optimally in the centralized system. Users have been incentivized through credit to move vehicles to areas of higher demand. Moreover, disposable vehicles have functioned poorly or even been non-functioning, creating consumer frustration and distrust. Lastly, inefficient data, monitoring and feedback systems will significantly impact the durability of shared vehicles. Vehicles need more frequent repair and replacement, which only increases environmental, social, and economic costs..

Strictly speaking, cheap bike-sharing companies purposefully provide more bikes than demand requires because if they don’t, a competitor will. Disposable bikes raise a huge concern about vandalism, tragedies of the commons, and other anti-sharing behavior. Purely from talking with people on the streets of Singapore, I have learnt that customers are very much frustrated because of the poor quality of these free-floating bikes. Ten minutes into the ride they cause knee pain, back pain and are impossible to ride uphill. E-scooters could potentially experience the same issue when it runs out of energy and there is no nearby charging station. What would you do with an E-scooter that has a flat battery just five minutes after you hop on? These issues derive from a centralized app-based model where necessary data for tackling the problem is incapable to be shared with city governments and other third parties.

The government as a key player

Enabling value or data exchange between shared mobility business vendors and the government will help to fight traffic congestion, vehicle ownership and parking demand. However, the businesses with a centralized app have claimed data on rides and consumers as their proprietary. In addition, City planners and regulators have difficulty in accessing private data from multiple touchpoints as the existing technology can hardly standardize, process and exchange in real time and at scale without violating individual privacy rights. Along with VeloxChain, few companies like IOMOB, MVLChain have evolved to design and commit into building a digital infrastructure and protocol to facilitate partnership between public-private, business-business, business-community in knowledge/value exchange with blockchain. “Without data sharing from the industry heavyweights on vehicle use patterns, it is difficult for cities to adapt to the rapid development of the sector and its impacts on traffic, road and parking infrastructure, other mobility services and the public good.”

The collaborative triangle: Government, business and society

On the Government-to-Business side of the triangle this means, in exchange for government’s provisioning, supporting and regulatory services (public infrastructure, licensing, policing, etc.) in the sharing mobility ecosystem, businesses must work with government (or an appropriate designee) to co-create and co-support an efficient data sharing platform on ride patterns, safety, and other critical metrics to inform urban planning and policies for secure, equitable, and sustainable transport.

On the Government-to-Society side, in exchange for ensuring the public good and adequate support for shared mobility, citizens must be encouraged to abide by codes of sharing conduct, including the care of public resources which may be used to host shared vehicles.

Finally, on the Business-to-Society side of the collaborative governance triangle, shared mobility companies must provide accessible, safe and sustainable mobility services without exploitative monetizing of consumers or drivers, while the latter agree to abide by codes of conduct for shared mobility that include reporting problems in services or sharing behavior.

In addition to strengthening reciprocal sharing relations among the three key constituents in collaborative governance triangle, we suggest that intermediary organizations are necessary to support continued adaptation of sharing governance through co-learning, co-evolution, and the co-creation of value. Such intermediaries include — mobility services business associations, drivers associations (among ride-hailing providers), and shared bike user groups.

Why VeloxChain is the answer

VeloxChain is an infrastructure and protocol that enables seamless collaboration between fleet management company and local sharing mobility, ride-hailing and park sharing vendors. The end goal is to offer the possibility of making multi-modal transport reservation to end users, forecasting supply-demand of sharing resource and planning maintenance of each individual vehicle.

The main point we try to solve here is the knowledge/value exchange incapability between different vendors and government parties. There are hundreds of sharing mobility programs operating in a fragmented system, influenced by the centralized model. With VeloxChain enabled, any local vendors can enjoy the collective technology advance to bootstrap their sharing mobility service and evolve along with other participants in a healthy competition and sustainable market growth.

Since VeloxChain is an open-source, vendors from anywhere in the world can adopt and employ our technology to redesign, customize or even white-label our solution package to strengthen their brand recognition under a standardized protocol design, so that participants can enjoy network effects deriving from user base, resources (vehicle, parking lots, market intelligence, etc…).

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