Despite a growing interest in using Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) as a tool to address rural transport problems, the question of how to organize such a concept remains unanswered. To address this knowledge gap, this article explores organizational elements of rural MaaS pilots. The analysis, which is based on participatory observation and interviews with actors involved in five pilots in rural areas of Sweden, reveals that the motives of the actors involved in rural MaaS both overlap with and diverge from the frequently stated objectives of urban MaaS developments. Both concepts center on complementing and extending public transport, but while urban MaaS is underpinned by the fight against climate change, congestion, and local pollution, the main objective of rural MaaS is to reduce transport poverty. The analysis, moreover, illustrates that despite the geographic differences, actors involved in rural MaaS pilots face similar organizational challenges as have been reported from urban MaaS developments. In both cases, actors struggle with finding their roles, mitigating uncertainties, distributing responsibilities, and negotiating business models. Finally, the analysis finds that rural MaaS puts higher expectations on user involvement than urban MaaS and identifies a risk that rural MaaS developments might contribute to spatial injustice since the studied pilots only supported rural communities with high social capital.
Parking management and planning can be used to address several issues related to sustainable urban development. For example, parking availability affects both car ownership and usage, and parking planning can affect both land use and building costs. A tool used in several countries is minimum parking requirements (MPR) and lowering these could be a pathway to more sustainable mobility. However, the actual effects of lower MPR have not systematically been studied. In this paper we present the results of a review of sixteen developments with low MPR in Sweden, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Existing research and reports have been analyzed to compare these and draw conclusions on the effect of MPR on mobility patterns and mobility services. In addition, interviews were conducted with representatives from municipalities and developers. Our results indicate that the mobility patterns of individuals in the studied projects are more sustainable than in nearby projects. However, the causality of MPR and mobility is hard to establish due to the risk of self-selection and that all of the studied projects have good prerequisites for sustainable mobility practices. Many of the studied evaluations are also of poor quality with, for example, lack of appropriate control group.