Research project funded by K2 (The Swedish Knowledge Centre for Public Transport)
Innovations in urban mobility are usually promoted by policy-makers and operators as sustainable alternatives to individual car ownership. Hence, they are discussed as potential solutions to traffic congestion and air pollution by, at the same time, providing users with seamless, tailored and digitalized mobility options. However, the anticipated benefits for the users of these innovations (in terms of flexibility, accessibility, time sovereignty, cost reduction) seem to receive much more attention than the potential effects over the workers providing, maintaining, and monitoring the services (in terms of work-life balance, time pressure, workload, safety perception). Similarly, academic research on passenger transport has explored mobility innovations mainly by focusing on the technologies involved, the implementation possibilities and the needs and behaviours of users, paying scarce attention to their impact on the well-being and working conditions of transport workers.