Developing countries are facing increasing challenges to make urban mobility sustainable and more specifically to tackle the continuously growing air pollution and congestion caused by rapid increase in car ownership. As part of a broad strategy to achieve sustainable urban mobility, car-sharing and bike-sharing services have the potential to take private cars off the road with minimal air pollution produced by their own (i.e. many car sharing schemes provide electric vehicles).

 

There has been a rapid expansion of shared economy in developing countries at recent years and in particular the bike-sharing service. For instance, the total number of shared bikes in China has already exceeded even the sum of all other countries. Nevertheless, many of such schemes failed to create the expected demand due to a lack of adequate market research. Specifically, it is unclear about the factors that could affect mode choice behaviour in the context of a developing country, hindering corresponding transport planning and policy making to promote the demand for these shared services.