In recent years, the rise of remote work has significantly impacted the dynamics of work and living environments across Europe and beyond, yet its spatial implications remain underexplored. This paper examines the spatial implications of remote work through a cross-case analysis of seven European case studies at the NUTS3 level- Barcelona, Lisbon, Milan, Vienna, Enschede, Stockholm, and Volos- drawing on primary data from 19 semi-structured interviews. The study focuses on five aspects of spatial implications: new spatialities and multilocality; urban development trends; housing and office demand; mobility and transport infrastructure; and the urban-rural divide. Through thematic and cross-case analysis, the paper identifies shared patterns and place-specific dynamics influenced by governance structures, housing markets, and transport systems. Findings suggest that while remote work is linked to residential relocation, reduced office demand, and increased multilocality, its impacts are shaped by local housing markets, governance structures, and transport systems. Cities with strong public infrastructure and housing regulations appear more adaptable, while others face challenges such as affordability issues, gentrification, and infrastructure gaps. The study contributes to the literature by bridging a critical gap in understanding how remote work reshapes urban and regional spaces beyond economic and technological lenses. It highlights the necessity for adaptable governance approaches that account for multilocal living, infrastructure needs, and spatial justice, thereby offering vital insights for spatial planners and policymakers navigating the post-pandemic urban transition. The findings underscore planning systems' role in fostering resilient, inclusive, and sustainable urban regions under the pressures and opportunities introduced by remote work.
This Data Descriptor presents the collected data on remote work among urban and rural workers, emphasizing differences in perceived flexibility, adaptability, preferences, career impacts, well-being, and productivity. The survey, conducted via Prolific between July and August 2024, captured data from 20,013 participants globally with European nationality, offering insights into the benefits and challenges faced by remote workers. Beyond its initial scope, the dataset can be reused to support a wide range of future studies and policy development initiatives. For instance, researchers can utilize this dataset to explore trends in work-life balance, productivity, and urban policy and planning related to remote work. Additionally, urban planners and policymakers can leverage the data to inform strategies for urban and regional development, infrastructure forecasting, planning, and community support in diverse geographic areas. The dataset’s granularity on socio-economic factors makes it an invaluable resource for developing targeted policies that address urban-rural disparities and foster sustainable remote working arrangements across Europe.
In an attempt to address the climate crisis and to deliver more resilient transport systems, it is important to use all transport options. Active Travel has come to the fore once again, while governments are trying to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In the UK for example, it has become a statutory requirement for Active Travel England to be consulted about any new walking, wheeling or cycling infrastructure project. However, evidence suggests that the uptake of Active Travel initiatives remains low. An important component of Active Travel planning are local users, since they are the ones who will have to use any new infrastructure in the long-term. Building on past research, this study is based on a cross-sectional survey about walking and cycling distributed in the UK. 474 responses were received and 252 valid responses were used in the ANOVA analysis. Active Travel barriers reported include for example lack of dedicated cycle lanes, inadequate lighting and insufficient pedestrian crossings, all of which are commonly mentioned in the literature. The innovation of this study is that it included the Stages of Change in a single survey, offering a holistic approach to support resilient infrastructure planning. Survey results facilitate the prioritisation of Active Travel projects based on travel activity and socio-economic group. Such a behavioural change approach allows local authorities to develop targeted Active Travel schemes and policies to support infrastructure development, while justifying the funds invested. Overall, findings can support local and regional authorities worldwide to improve Active Travel uptake.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged as a promising solution to meet the sustainability goals of the transport sector, particularly in the short term. A large number of countries have introduced initiatives and policies to encourage the adoption and transition to EVs. However, the market share of EVs remains relatively low in comparison to internal-combustion-engine vehicles, largely due to various concerns by consumers. In this paper, we propose an integrated model combining the theory of planned behaviour and the value-belief-norm theory, to specifically incorporate past EV driving experiences of current consumers and understand the factors influencing their EV purchase intentions in the context of China. Our findings identify attitudes and personal norms as the primary drivers of EV purchase intentions, with a significantly positive correlation between past EV driving experiences and the intention to purchase an EV. In addition, specific latent variables such as attitudes toward EVs, personal norms, subjective norms and perceived behaviour control partially mediate this relationship. The socio-demographic analysis indicates that female consumers, highly educated and middle-aged individuals, as well as residents of relatively more developed regions show a higher likelihood of purchasing EVs, based on their past EV driving experiences. These insights can add value for key stakeholders such as EV manufacturers, retailers, government authorities and policymakers when formulating more effective policies supporting the Sustainable Development Goals.
In recent years, there has been a remarkable development in the technology and legislation related to electric and autonomous vehicles (i.e., EVs/AVs). This technological advancement requires the deployment of the most up-to-date supporting infrastructure to achieve safe operation. Further infrastructure is needed for Level 5 vehicles, namely the introduction of super-fast wireless 5G technology. To achieve harmony between the rapid technological advancement of EVs/AVs and environmental preservation, enacting legislation related to their sustainable use is vital. Thus, this manuscript provides a review of the technological development of EVs/AVs, with a special focus on carbon footprints and the implementation of additive manufacturing using recycled materials. While EVs have a 12.13% increased carbon footprint compared to conventional vehicles, AVs with basic and advanced intelligence features have an increased carbon footprint of 41.43% and 99.65%, respectively. This article emphasizes that the integration of 3D-printed components has the potential to offset this impact with a substantial 60% reduction. As a result, custom-made solutions involving 3D printing are explored, leading to greater speed, customization, and cost-effectiveness for EVs/AVs. This article also lists the advantages and disadvantages of the existing legislation in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the western Balkans, demonstrating various approaches to promoting electric mobility and the development of autonomous vehicles. In Spain, initiatives like the MOVES program incentivize EV adoption, while the UK focuses on expanding the EV market and addressing concerns about EVs’ quiet operation. In the western Balkans, the adoption of legislation lags behind, with limited incentives and infrastructure for EVs. To boost sales, legal mechanisms are necessary to reduce costs and improve accessibility, in addition to offering subsidies for the purchase of EVs. To this end, an analysis of the incentive measures proposed for the development and use of renewable power sources for the supply of energy for EVs/AVs is presented.
Hailed as the next transportation revolution, automated vehicles (AVs) are expected to have dramatic impacts on the environment, economies, and society. Potential benefits of, as well as any potential burdens from, AV deployment will depend in large part on whether and how individuals will use them. Gaining a better understanding of public attitudes towards AVs can thus provide important insights into the future of automated transportation. This conference session brought together participants from the academic, planning, and commercial business development sectors to learn about the status of public attitudes towards and preferences for AVs, discuss transferable results from prior engagement projects and promotion campaigns, exchange strategies for engaging citizens in the AV planning process, and coordinate strategies at an international level. During the session, the presenters highlighted key findings and lessons learned from prior research and engagement efforts, as well as outlined areas for future work and research.
The ‘new mobility’ is claimed to promise improved transport services with reduced socioeconomic and environmental impacts whilst at the same time creating high-value business opportunities. The present article contributes to understanding the latter part of this promise through analysing the sources of value creation in the new mobility industry. It makes a novel application of a business model concepts - the Dynamic Capabilities approach - to transport research. Drawing on findings from expert interviews with professionals in innovation clusters, the findings reveal that new mobility companies benefit from an inherent dynamism and a continuous learning culture. The participation in networks and alliances let companies reach broader market solutions through cross-regional collaboration. These ecosystems are well equipped to address wider mobility needs founded on managing data. For managers in the new mobility, key conclusions are that establishing a concise value proposition and expanding key resources such as staff skills or data management procedures are crucial for business sustainability.
Elderly drivers are at a higher risk of road accidents, mostly due to ageing-influenced degradation of motoric, sensory and cognitive skills, which can lead to longer traffic incident detection and response times, worse risk perception, poorer decision making, and worsened performance of simultaneous tasks. To raise awareness among the elderly population and support medical practitioners about these issues, we have developed an online platform with two video-based interactive tasks which aimed at assessing driver's elements of situational awareness, attention and response inhabitation of elderly drivers. The results show that elderly participants, aged over 60 years old in this case, experience difficulties in maintaining high situational awareness of the driving environment, and found hard responding to inappropriate stimuli, which may indicate a decline in cognitive skills.
Tourism and transport are intertwined, both as a means to reach a tourism destination, and as an end in itself to enjoy the travel experience by a specific transport mode. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) encompass both, with a direct and indirect impact on tourism marketing and management, despite the early deployment stage of this mode of transport. According to an extensive AV survey administered in 25 countries (www.wise-act.eu/survey2021), an AV is defined as ‘a vehicle which takes over speed and steering control completely and permanently, on all roads and in all situations. The driver-passenger cannot drive manually because the vehicle does not have a steering wheel. The driver-passenger only sets the travel destination’. AVs include land, sea and air travel, aiming at improving human error-derived travel safety. AV trials have taken place across the world, from Arizona and California to Norway and Stockholm. China and Japan have also been active in AV travel testing in Asia, which is a largely growing region for tourism.
According to UN statistics, the population of people in vulnerable social groups, namely elderly people, people with disabilities, and low-income populations, has increased over the recent decades. It is projected that this trend will continue in the future. Thus, their mobility and access to transport services are important areas to study. Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a digital platform (smartphone application) that aims to encourage more sustainable travel. MaaS is promoted as being accessible to all user groups. However, there are limited studies linking MaaS with vulnerable social groups and their particular needs. This paper comprehensively reviews studies on the emergence of such platforms since 2014 until today to identify the research gaps with respect to vulnerable social groups. A framework and MaaS Inclusion Index (MaaSINI) are then proposed to evaluate the inclusion in MaaS services, focusing on vulnerable social groups' needs at a service level instead of a city/area level. The framework and policy recommendations proposed in this study will make a significant contribution in guiding stakeholders and policymakers in implementing accessible-for-all-users MaaS services targeting sustainable and inclusive transport.
Automation carries paradigm-shifting potential for urban transport and has critical sustainability dimensions for the future of our cities. This article examines the diverse environmental and energy-related dimensions of automated mobility at the city level by reviewing an emerging and increasingly diversified volume of literature for road, rail, water, and air passenger transport. The multimodal nature of this investigation provides the opportunity for a novel contribution that adds value to the literature in four distinctive ways. It reviews from a sustainability angle the state of the art underpinning the transition to a paradigm of automated mobility, identifies current knowledge gaps highlighting the scarcity of non-technical research outside the autonomous car's realm, articulates future directions for research and policy development, and proposes a conceptual model that contextualizes the automation-connectivity-electrification-sharing-multimodality nexus as the only way forward for vehicle automation to reach its pro-environmental and resource-saving potential.
Bicycle Sharing Schemes (BSS) are re-emerging as promising components of urban mobility solutions worldwide. However, the lack of consistent collaboration strategies between different actors and institutions, which have been tested in a wide range of cities and contexts regarding their design, tender, operation and expansion, raises significant social and governance implications. Urban transport features as a melting pot for diverse policy objectives, ranging from business model innovation, public tendering, and accessibility increase to the equity and social justice agenda. By employing a Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework and by introducing alluvial diagrams and circular dendrograms to BSS planning through a mixed-methods approach, this article illustrates an innovative tool in managing BSS in the context of the Global South. The strength of such diagrams has been underestimated to date since they can be particularly useful for public and private urban transport planners and policy-makers. Visualising user flows in such a manner, particularly in near-live time, may offer valuable insight on the operational challenges of BSS. Findings of the cross-sectional survey in Santiago de Chile confirm that maintenance is significant for user satisfaction levels. Furthermore, decisions regarding BSS expansion and modification could be based on such analysis and diagrams due to the precise identification of both the busiest and those under-represented BSS stations based on revealed preferences.
People travel by car for a wide variety of reasons. A large proportion of household travel is for non-commuting purposes, including social and recreational journeys. The emergence and (potential) diffusion of highly automated vehicles, also known as autonomous vehicles (AVs), could transform the way (some) people work and travel. Should they become mainstream, AVs could reshape patterns of leisure travel. To date, however, the impacts and implications of AVs beyond commuting trips have received minimal attention from transport scholarship. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of literatures on AVs. It follows PRISMA guidelines and synthesises 63 papers on AV travel focusing on non-commuting journeys, including travel for purposes of leisure, tourism, shopping and visiting friends and relatives. Given the economic importance of the tourism sector and its inherent focus on non-commuting journeys, this analysis is supplemented with a review of the extent to which national tourism strategies of countries leading AV deployment include reference to AVs. The paper reveals an overwhelming focus on commuting journeys in existing AV studies as less than one-fifth of the reviewed academic sources include non-commuting as part of their wider analysis. The review's further key findings are that the interest of publics in AVs for leisure journeys appears to exceed that for commuting, sharing vehicles will be less likely when AVs are used for leisure and there is an absence of recognition in the literature that certain non-commuting journeys will require a lower SAE level of automation. Surprisingly, analysis of the national tourism strategies of countries most prepared to meet the challenges of AVs shows that just three countries make specific reference to AVs within their national tourism strategies. The paper contributes to setting future AV policy agendas by concluding that two gaps must be narrowed: one, the distance between how academic studies predominantly conceive of AV use (commuting) and articulated public interest in AVs for non-commuting journeys; and two, the lack of readiness in certain national tourism strategies to accommodate AVs. As non-commuting journeys are likely to represent some of the earliest trip purposes for which AVs could be adopted, the paper points to the potential barriers to AV uptake by remaining focused on a limited set of trip purposes.
The introduction of shared autonomous vehicles into the transport system is suggested to bring significant impacts on traffic conditions, road safety and emissions, as well as overall reshaping travel behaviour. Compared with a private autonomous vehicle, a shared automated vehicle (SAV) is associated with different willingness-to-adopt and willingness-to-pay characteristics. An important aspect of future SAV adoption is the presence of other passengers in the SAV—often people unknown to the cotravellers. This study presents a cross-country exploration of user preferences and WTP calculations regarding mode choice between a private non-autonomous vehicle, and private and shared autonomous vehicles. To explore user preferences, the study launched a survey in seven European countries, including a stated-preference experiment of user choices. To model and quantify the effect of travel mode attributes and socio-demographic characteristics, the study employs a mixed logit model. The model results were the basis for calculating willingness-to-pay values for all countries and travel modes, and provide insight into the significant heterogeneous, gender-wise effect of cotravellers in the choice to use an SAV. The study results highlight the importance of analysis of the effect of SAV attributes and shared-ride conditions on the future acceptance and adoption rates of such services.
This chapter first systematically summarizes the most important findings and policy implications of each of the chapters included in this book volume. Next it synthesizes the overall findings and policy implications, and discusses future avenues for policy making and research. A first conclusion is that the chapters make clear that the ranges in policy relevant implications of AVs, within the scope of each chapter/topic, are still relatively broad. Secondly we conclude that research that is conceptually rich is more valuable for policy making. Thirdly we hypothesize that context matters for the uptake, impacts, and specific system design characteristics of real world AV implementation. Fourth we conclude that research on the global south has been limited so far. Fifth we argue that AVs, shared vehicles and electric vehicles (EVs) might stimulate each other in a positive way, in all directions. Finally we conclude that AVs will have wider societal implications, such as in the area of land use, accessibility, social exclusion, governmental expenditures, the labor market, and the environment. The more indirect the effects of AVs are, the more difficult they are to understand. For policy making a first conclusion is that the issues of ethics, cyber security and data protection deserve way more attention than they currently get. We also conclude that future motorway network extensions might not be no-regret anymore, because of possible congestion reductions due to AVs, but also because of decreasing marginal values of time. Finally we argue that countries that introduce AVs later than other countries can learn a lot from the real world experiences elsewhere.
Autonomous vehicles are anticipated to play an important role on future mobility offering encouraging solutions to today's transport problems. However, concerns of the public, which can affect the AVs' uptake, are yet to be addressed. This study presents relevant findings of an online survey in eight European countries. First, 1639 responses were collected in Spring 2020 on people's commute, preferred transport mode, willingness to use AVs and demographic details. Data was analyzed for the entire dataset and for vulnerable road users in particular. Results re-confirm the long-lasting discourse on the importance of safety on the acceptance of AVs. Spearman correlations show that age, gender, education level and number of household members have an impact on how people may be using or allowing their children to use the technology, e.g., with or without the presence of a human supervisor in the vehicle. Results on vulnerable road users show the same trend. The elderly would travel in AVs with the presence of a human supervisor. People with disabilities have the same proclivity, however their reactions were more conservative. Next to safety, reliability, affordability, cost, driving pleasure and household size may also impact the uptake of AVs and shall be considered when designing relevant policies.
The technology that allows fully automated driving already exists and it may gradually enter the market over the forthcoming decades. Technology assimilation and automated vehicle acceptance in different countries is of high interest to many scholars, manufacturers, and policymakers worldwide. We model the mode choice between automated vehicles and conventional cars using a mixed multinomial logit heteroskedastic error component type model. Specifically, we capture preference heterogeneity assuming a continuous distribution across individuals. Different choice scenarios, based on respondents’ reported trip, were presented to respondents from six European countries: Cyprus, Hungary, Iceland, Montenegro, Slovenia, and the UK. We found that large reservations towards automated vehicles exist in all countries with 70% conventional private car choices, and 30% automated vehicles choices. We found that men, under the age of 60, with a high income who currently use private car, are more likely to be early adopters of automated vehicles. We found significant differences in automated vehicles acceptance in different countries. Individuals from Slovenia and Cyprus show higher automated vehicles acceptance while individuals from wealthier countries, UK, and Iceland, show more reservations towards them. Nontrading mode choice behaviors, value of travel time, and differences in model parameters among the different countries are discussed.