Sharing economy in smart city transportation services

Sharing economy has created a number of opportunities for Smart Cities and their communities around the world to create a better and smarter working and living environment. With economic transactions that usually happen through a variety of interconnected data-driven digital platforms, sharing economy has a potential to improve asset utilization and reduce transaction cost or waste effectively and efficiently. Similar to the aims of Smart Cities in providing better and smarter working and living environment, sharing economy is seemingly a natural match for Smart Cities. Nonetheless, the critics around sharing economy, highlight several potential challenges in several fronts, i.e. regulation, inequality and sustainability. Based on the insights gained from User Research conducted in Indonesia, Australia and USA for the last four months, we build our initial arguments to validate the challenges of the current sharing economy practice embedded in app-based transportation services.