SUMC preferred usage

These are the preferred ways to use various terms from our industry. For terms not included here, see the style authorities page for general guidelines.

General rules:

• For terms like electric vehicles that are commonly referred to by initialisms, spell out the term on the first usage in a work or a major section, and indicate the abbreviation in parentheses. After that, you can use the initials (e.g., "electric vehicles (EVs)" on first use, "EVs" thereafter).
• Unless otherwise indicated, we prefer closed compounds to hyphenated or open ones. So, bikeshare, not bike-share or bike share. There are many exceptions to this rule, and the Chicago Manual of Style has a helpful chart listing most of them.
• Also on the subject of hyphens, normally open compounds like first and last mile should be hyphenated when used as an adjective before a noun (i.e. first-mile, last-mile, first-/last-mile, or first- and last-mile in front of words like problem or connections). They should be left open, regardless of their grammatical function, if used after a noun or on their own.
• The normal English rules of capitalization apply to our work: do not capitalize words unless they're a proper noun (including brand names) or the first word in a sentence. Do not capitalize because it's being abbreviated to something with capital letters, or just seems important to what you're writing.
• Automated spell-checkers may have different ideas about what version is correct, so you might consider adding the preferred versions to a personal dictionary to avoid nagging and squiggly lines.
• We are not obligated to follow companies' branding or promotional choices, particularly in use of ALL-CAPS (or conversely no caps at all) or other non-standard treatments of product names that are not initialisms. Treat these like you would any other proper noun: use normal Title Case. All caps in particular provide If you feel the brand marking deserves discussion (as in a case study or other extended treatment where the question might come up) you might do something like "The Twin Cities' Hourcar service (stylized as HOURCAR), was launched in 2005". You never need to include markers like™, ®, etc. Those are for companies' defense of their own IP and are not our concern. For less visually distracting, but still nonstandard, names like eBay or iPad, it's probably easier to just follow the companies' treatment (and no need to capitalize the first letter if you're starting a sentence with it, but try to avoid this since it's also distracting).

If you're quoting something from a non-SUMC source that uses a different rendering of one of these terms, it's okay to correct it to our preferred (closed) version without indicating the correction with brackets. If a source uses an entirely different word, in a way that we define differently (seen most commonly with rideshare to mean ridehail), then you should substitute our preferred term but use brackets. (E.g., "The study followed more than 200 [ridehail] drivers on their lunch breaks.") Formal academic or legal contexts have stricter rules about indicating changes, but the foregoing applies to general writing for sites and publications SUMC controls.

Where this list has entries with no further commentary, it represents the preferred rendering of the term(s), and further usage is assumed to be self-explanatory based on the general rules around hyphens/spacing, abbreviations, etc. If you find yourself frequently using a term that's not in this list, especially if it's something you see rendered in a number of different ways, please feel free to add an entry to this list. If this eventually gets too long, we can split it into separate pages, titled something like "Term (usage)."

• Autonomous vehicles (AVs)
• Bikeshare or bikesharing
• Carshare or carsharing
• First and last mile: Use space between words when referring to the concept alone (i.e. “the first and last mile on a transportation journey”). When using part or all of the term as an adjective before a noun, hyphenate.
• Fixed-route transit: See Public transit
• Limousines: Used interchangeably with limos, but always limousines on first reference.
• Micromobility: This term should be used for fleet deployments of bikes and scooters, or else individually owned bikes or scooters used for personal trips--but not to mean bikes and/or scooters generally (just use bike or scooter), and definitely not for bikes/trikes transporting cargo or other non-personal loads.
• Microtransit: This is the preferred term for technology-enabled on-demand transit services, especially those that use mobile technology for ride requests, payment, and routing. Other terms that are related, but not necessarily interchangeable with microtransit:
  • Demand-responsive transit/transport (DRT): Per NTD, this refers to "a transit mode comprised of passenger cars, vans or small buses operating in response to calls from passengers or their agents to the transit operator, who then dispatches a vehicle to pick up the passengers and transport them to their destinations." This is the broadest term for this mode, of which microtransit and paratransit are subsets. Without modification, DRT is not necessarily tech-enabled, distinguishing it from microtransit, and is not limited to riders with disabilities, distinguishing it from paratransit.
  • Paratransit: In olden times, and outside the US, paratransit was used to refer to DRT in general, but since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), it's most commonly understood to mean wheelchair-accessible DRT for people with disabilities. Sometimes you'll see ADA paratransit to refer to the federally required service in the "shadow" of fixed routes, contrasted with premium paratransit to mean service provided outside the parameters of what's required (either in terms of timing, distance, or the passengers served). If you're talking about paratransit services that are not limited to qualified riders or people with disabilities, it might be useful to call it general-public paratransit.
  • Flexible shuttle service
  • Flex-route services
• Mobility as a service (MaaS): Not capitalized and does not take hyphens in any position.
• Mobility on demand (MOD): No hyphens, and need not be capitalized in general usage, but it should be in proper names (e.g. "Mobility on Demand Sandbox" but "six new mobility on demand (MOD) projects").
• Policymaker
• Public transit: This term can be used interchangeably with public transportation to refer to either the service or the industry generally. It should not be used interchangeably with fixed-route transit, which you should use only when you want to refer to scheduled bus or train service that operates on a specific route.
• Ridehail or ridehailing: This is SUMC's preferred term for commercial, on-demand small-vehicle taxi service provided by Uber and Lyft. Many writers, with the industry's urging, use ridesharing instead, but in our work this should be reserved for non-commercial carpool-like services where the rider and passengers actually share a destination. You'll often see it used interchangeably with the following, and it's not worth correcting when quoting (beyond fixing space or hyphenation):
  • Transportation network company/companies (TNCs): This originates with the California legal definition of the service type, the first statutory definition in the US.
  • Ridesourcing: Means the same thing as ridehailing, and in early SUMC publications we often preferred this, but now we're grown and prefer -hailing in our own original writing.
• Ridesharing: Use only to refer to non-commercial carpool-like services where the rider and passengers actually share a destination. It should not be used for what Uber does. This term can be used interchangeably with:
  • Carpool/carpooling
  • Slugging
  • Community carpool
• Scootersharing: Please refer to the shared mode as electric scootershare/scootersharing or scootershare/scootersharing. Do not use e-scootershare/e-scootersharing. If referring to electric scooters themselves, individually or as a group, shared or not, it's fine to use e-scooters or electric scooters.
• Shared mobility: This is a preferred term but can be used interchangeably with shared-use mobility, in which you should always hyphenate shared-use.
• Taxis: Interchangeable with taxi services.
• Wheelchair-accessible vehicles (WAVs)