How to Digitally Right-Size Vehicle Fleets
One of the critical components of a successful micromobility program is how it stays within the “Goldilocks zone” of fleet sizes. Too many vehicles leads to oversaturation, cluttering public spaces and potentially creating dangerous situations. Too few vehicles means cities could be underserving residents and missing revenue opportunities. To address the goldilocks situation, we’ve launched a new metric within City Conductor to help city staff find the “just-right” number of vehicles for their community.
Introducing the Vehicle Utilization Metric
Vehicle Utilization (VU) is Conductor’s way of describing the number of trips per device deployed within a specified timeframe. For example, if last week a city had 100 vehicles in circulation, and together they made 250 trips, then the average number of trips made by each vehicle last week was 2.5—this is Vehicle Utilization.
But is 2.5 a “good score”? The answer is unique to each city, and in many cases, each neighborhood—no two are alike! To make a determination, city analysts and planners factor in a variety of information sources. A fleet that’s too big may have several indicators that vehicles are taking up public space without adding enough value, such as increases in safety incidents or resident complaints involving micromobility vehicles—and a low VU within City Conductor. By contrast, a fleet that’s not big enough to meet demand presents as the opposite: high VU.
Armed with this information, cities can create policies to establish maximum numbers of vehicles operators may deploy (a.k.a. fleet caps) and/or create operator incentives for increased deployment or rebalancing in order to get to their own “just-right” VU. Moreover, these policies can be city-wide or limited to individual neighborhoods.
Using Vehicle Utilization for Revenue
Cities can use VU as a basis for their micromobility pricing. In this model, when an operator adheres to both the established fleet cap and VU targets, they are charged standard per-vehicle fees. If they exceed the VU, they may apply for a higher fleet cap and/or reduced fees; conversely, if operators underperform on VU, they may face lowered fleet caps and/or increased fees as a result. For us, this is Lacuna’s favorite kind of policy—where both cities and operators are motivated to create strong ridership, inspiring more residents to switch to micromobility from less sustainable modes and opening up new possibilities for social equity and transportation justice.
Using Vehicle Utilization for Equity
One of these possibilities is driven by the new metric’s capability to filter by geography. City staff can view or download the Vehicle Utilization metrics of different neighborhoods and compare them to each other. If a designated Equity Zone, transit desert, or other traditionally underserved area is an outlier due to a noticeably higher VU, it could be an indication operators are not incentivized enough to bring equitable levels of service to these neighborhoods. Additionally, staff can filter by operator to see if the issue is common to all operators or just specific companies. This information serves as a jumping-off point for creating new equity-based policies, or for measuring the success of existing ones.
The Vehicle Utilization metric is a powerful proxy for right-sizing micromobility fleets, and can be used to create policies that bring better transportation access to residents, improve the health of city budgets, and help operators scale.
We’d love to chat if you’re interested in learning more about how digital tools can help you with these or similar issues. We’re here to help.
