Shared mobility is the field where the atlas records its highest failure rate — and where the failures were almost never technical. Bike-share, car-share, scooters and mobility-as-a-service have all produced schemes that worked as advertised and shut down anyway.
The atlas holds 30 documented entries across 21 cities in 15 countries, from Paris' 2007 bike-share to robotaxi districts opening in 2026. This guide connects to the Mobility-as-a-Service definition and to why smart cities fail.
Read these together, because the pattern only appears when you do.
| Scheme | What it achieved | Why it ended |
|---|---|---|
| Autolib' Paris (2011–2018) | ~4,000 electric cars, ~1,080 stations, ~150,000 subscribers | ~€293.6M accumulated deficit; the public syndicate refused to absorb it |
| Bycyklen Copenhagen (2014–2022) | Rides rose from 169,000 to 933,000 in one year | Municipalities and the rail operator withdrew subsidies; operator bankrupt, never replaced |
| Whim Helsinki (2016–2024) | Independent evaluation: subscribers made 73% of trips by public transport, against 48% for the average resident | MaaS Global went bankrupt; the acquirer did not relaunch in Helsinki |
Whim is the sharpest case. An independent Ramboll evaluation of its first operating year found precisely the behaviour change the whole MaaS concept promises — and the company still failed. Behavioural success and commercial survival are independent variables. Any business case that assumes the first guarantees the second is unsupported by this record.
The long-running entries share a structural feature: a public body owns the scheme or holds the contract, and treats it as transport rather than as a venture.
Barcelona's Bicing has run since 2007 under municipal control, now around 8,000 bikes and 170,000 subscribers with over 100 million trips since its 2019 e-bike relaunch. Vélib', BikeMi, BiciMAD, Santander Cycles and Seoul's Ttareungyi tell the same story across five countries: docked, publicly backed bike-share is one of the most durable interventions in the whole atlas.
That is not an argument against private operators. It is an argument about who carries the deficit when ridership is good but revenue is not — which, in every failure above, is the question nobody settled in advance.
Dockless vehicles arrived faster than any city's rulebook. Three responses are documented here, and all three converged on data rather than bans.
Los Angeles wrote its own open standard — the Mobility Data Specification — requiring operators to share standardised trip and vehicle data; it is now used by well over 100 cities, and Denver regulates under it. Beijing froze new deployments in 2017 after 15 companies dumped more than 2.35 million bikes on its streets, then required data streaming, seasonal fleet caps and geofenced parking; the boom's casualty, ofo, ran out of money in 2018 leaving users queuing for deposit refunds that never came. Milan runs a data-driven permit regime of its own.
Denver's recorded lesson is worth carrying into any procurement: consolidating to a single operator simplifies the app and the administration — and concentrates all the leverage in one vendor's hands.
Tokyo's LUUP entry is unusual in this field for publishing both sides. The operator reports 17,000+ ports and 6 million+ app downloads by 2026; the same entry records that police-cited nationwide accidents for this vehicle category rose from 219 to 367 in a year, roughly 70% of them in Tokyo. Most shared-mobility marketing reports the first number. A city deciding on permit conditions needs the second.
Osaka's vertiport is the hype-cycle marker: a finished piece of infrastructure whose headline promise — paying passengers flying across Osaka Bay for the Expo — never happened, because safety certification was not ready. The building is real. The service is now expected around 2028.
The practical takeaway: shared mobility does change travel behaviour — the independent evidence here supports that. What it does not reliably do is pay for itself. Cities that treated it as public transport still have it; cities that treated it as a venture are the ones writing post-mortems.