Analyzing and Optimizing Shared Mobility Fleet Impacts

Passenger vehicles enable activity, but they generate unpriced negative externalities such as air emissions and traffic. Those externalities constitute a market failure that may justify policy intervention. Passenger vehicle travel, especially within urban areas, is being transformed by vehicle electrification and by shared mobility options offered by ridesourcing services such as Uber and Lyft. These transformations’ impacts on externalities are unclear a priori, as is the role of policy to influence them. To investigate these externalities and what options can address them, I use a mixture of simulation and empirical analysis.