Transportation
How we move matters. We don’t drive our cars so much as they drive us - and they have driven many opportunities for physical activity out of our day-to-day lives. When we choose active modes of transit (by foot, bicycle, scooter or public transportation), we move more than when we drive or are driven. Those more active modes also bring with them other positive behaviors, such as being outdoors and experiencing casual social interactions. We looked at two categories of products and services: mobility services and mapping and directions services.
Overall Ratings
Company
Category
H-Score
Highlights
Three services – Bird, Lime and Transit – that are focused on more active modes of transportation scored highest. Bird and Lime both provide micromobility solutions – offering shared access to (primarily) scooters and bikes, while Transit is a startup that aims to facilitate the public transit experience, offering schedules and, in some locations, real-time directions and integration with payments.
Mobility Services
The emergence of rideshare services by Lyft and Uber, along with bike share and, more recently, shared electric scooters has led to the idea of mobility-as-a-service. Access to different modes of transportation have become available on demand through apps, obviating in many circumstances the need to own personal vehicles (whether cars, bikes or scooters). For this category, we looked at services from four companies: Lyft and Uber, the dominant players in the rideshare market (although each offers other modes as well) and Bird and Lime, which are leaders in the micromobilty (i.e. bikes and scooters) services market.
Highlights and Opportunities
Bird and Lime scored highest here, the result of positive scores for physical activity, social connection and getting outdoors. While scooters in particular don’t offer as much physical activity as a walk or a bike ride, their use brings one outdoors and in a way that makes for easy social interaction. Lime has proactively encouraged these behaviors through a tour offering – something that Bird could adopt as well. Each could likely score higher if they expanded access to and shifted more ridership to shared bike services.
Lyft and Uber both scored in health-positive territory, despite the extent to which they facilitate more automobile transport. Lyft in particular got points for subsidizing rides to grocery stores for low-income riders and likely scored higher than Uber on physical activity due to a greater emphasis on bikeshare and their inclusion of public transit and multimodal trip directions in their app. Both got their highest marks for helping users engage socially – as Building H’s consumer research shows that most riders find their rideshare interactions to be positive and other research has shown how rideshare can reduce social isolation for seniors. Both Lyft and Uber have opportunities to do better by including walking directions in their apps and using design and pricing strategies to shift more of their users to more active modes of transportation.
Methodology
For eating, we looked at any food-specific programs the companies had connected to their services (e.g. Lyft has a delivery tie-in with Grubhub).
Physical activity was the most complicated of the behaviors as each service offers multiple modes of transportation that each have different impacts. We looked at: the mix of modes offered; how they are designed and promoted; data on distribution of use across modes, from company-published data, Building H consumer research(1) and other studies. We also looked at research on how the services displace other modes of transportation.
In general, the influences on sleep in this category are indirect – i.e. better sleep has been associated with increases in physical activity and time spent outdoors. The potential time savings that come from use of rideshare services are also factored in as research has shown positive correlations between reduced travel time and time slept.
For engaging socially we looked at our own research on the social experiences of rideshare riders, the degree to which services support casual social interactions, any efforts to program social opportunities along with the services and research on the impact of mobility access on social isolation.
Finally, for the influence on how much time users spend outdoors, we looked at the nature of the service (e.g. riding a scooter or a bicycle is an outdoor activity) and any programming efforts (e.g. Lime Tours) aimed at getting people outdoors.
Mapping and Directions Services
It’s hard to imagine going anywhere new without Google Maps or Apple Maps to guide you there. They have transformed the experience of driving and are increasingly supporting directions for walking, bicycling and using public transportation services. In this subcategory, we looked at the two dominant mapping and directions services, along with a startup, Transit, that focuses specifically on mapping and direction for – and facilitating the use of – public transportation.
H-Score
63
58
57
Highlights and Opportunities
Transit scores the highest in this category, eclipsing both Google and Apple Maps for the behaviors of physical activity and social connection. Public transit tends to lead to more physical activity than driving due to the walking within the system and often at each end. It’s also more social (compared to automobile use) in that it’s inherently public.
Key opportunities in this category include more proactive search methods for connecting people with healthy food and nudging more users to active transportation modes. Specifically, Apple and Google could use defaults to encourage walking, bicycling or scooters for shorter distances and experiment with offering different possible optimizations for routes, such scenic or social routes, as alternatives to the fastest routes.
Methodology
Apple and Google Maps are both used to find food, so we looked at how they support searches for healthier options.
For physical activity, we looked at how the services influence users to choose one type of transportation mode over another. Specifically, we looked at our own consumer research on how users say mapping applications have changed their behavior, how the services use defaults to preference certain modes of transportation, and the quality of the experiences for the different modes.
Influences on sleep were indirect and based on influences on physical activity and time spent outdoors.
We examined influences on engaging socially by looking at the nature of the different services, each of which is ultimately designed to get people to leave their homes, and any features that promote social engagement.
To assess the influence on getting users to spend time outdoors, we looked again at the influence on mode of transportation, given that certain modes (e.g. walking, bicycling, scootering) are typically outdoor activities. We also looked at the existence of features, such as pre-loaded searches for hiking trails nearby, that facilitate getting outdoors.
Team
Research, analysis and writing by Steve Downs and Samara Shima. Review and editing by Sara Singer and Steve Downs.
Notes
Steve Downs. A Survey of Modern Life: Mobility. Building H on Medium. January 12, 2022