The issue of creating more sustainable mobility systems has been revisited during the past 50 years. So far, we are still waiting for an innovative systemic change that is not simply an iteration of existing technologies. This standstill is to a large degree due to the hegemonic mobility paradigm, working under a “predict and provide”-driven approach, with little attention being paid to environmental and social externalities. This paper calls for a new understanding of mobility transition interlinked with the cultural values of modern societies, deeply rooted in the mobile risk society. To create sustainable mobility practices we need robust, socially coherent, and inclusive mobility systems that are more than just transportation systems and connections. The empirical starting point is a visionary workshop on designing “Sustainable Innovative Mobility Solutions” in three urban areas in Copenhagen. The workshop created a cross-disciplinary space for actors to meet across dominant silos and acknowledge the need for intervention framings to focus on innovation as a matter of interlinking sustainable mobilities practices within everyday living in a mobile risk society.
This article discusses the potentials of reorienting traditional rational transport planning towards a mobilities approach that includes social perspectives of practices in everyday lives. Empirically, the discussion is based on results from a MaaS intervention project in two urban areas and one sub-urban area in Greater Copenhagen. This article argues that attention to context, experience, storytelling, identity, and inequality are fundamental in changing interlocked, non-sustainable practices. Achieving a sustainable transformation of transportation, including promoting shared mobility and MaaS solutions as alternatives to private car use, requires a holistic view of the role and organization of everyday mobilities as more than just a technological issue. This article concludes that MaaS has the potential to be a strong tool, but technologies and short experiments are not enough. New MaaS solutions need time to implement, and relying on the free market as a way forward is potentially problematic when this can lead to mobility inequalities between different areas.
A key theme has emerged on to the mobility research scene throughout the last two decades, namely sustainable mobilities which asks questions such as: How do we understand the dynamics behind mobil...