Short-term Sharing Is Caring

The coronavirus pandemic has affected almost every aspect of daily life, from day-to-day consumption to political and societal course changes. One of the segments that largely experienced growth instead of a decline in 2020 is the short-term shared mobility service market. Data from our Statista Mobility Outlook shows that bike sharing in particular has drastically its revenue compared to 2019.

With proceeds rising from $5 billion to roughly $6.6 billion, this specific branch of short-term sharing saw an increase of 32 percent last year. Bike sharing is also by far the most-used on-demand mobility service worldwide with roughly 669 million people using a shared bicycle in 2020. With tighter government regulations and a general hesitation of the public to use transport services with enclosed spaces, it's no surprise that car sharing revenue went down by over $2 billion when comparing 2019 to 2020. What's more surprising: As of 2020, e-scooter services like Lime or Tier were used by more people than car sharing services. Still, this segment of the mobility sector only contributed roughly $1 billion or 6 percent of the total short-term sharing market revenue in the past year, although researchers are already looking at how to best integrate these kinds of micro services into urban infrastructure planning.

Even after the expected pandemic slump of 2020, the mobility market is expected to grow steadily over the next couple of years. Flights, ride-hailing and public transportation excluding trains made up the majority of the $752 billion of revenue generated in 2020 by an estimated four billion users around the globe.