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Abstract
Existing mobility solutions are criticized for falling short of effectively addressing transport issues and sustainability challenges. In this light, smart mobility has received increasing attention. In the Netherlands, the smart mobility concept triggered various developments, leading to the uptake of initiatives for real-life experimentation, accompanied by an increase in media attention. While the concept is making its way through Dutch society, its meaning for practice remains unspecified. Therefore, this paper aims to unpack the meaning of the smart mobility concept, by analyzing Dutch news articles and initiatives’ websites using text mining and qualitative content analysis. The analyses reveal some ambiguous meanings for the smart mobility concept, demonstrating on the one hand a focus on incremental technological innovations that bring forward car-based solutions for short-term fixes, while on the other hand promising to address car-related issues and fundamentally change the mobility system by taking long-term challenges into account. In general, smart mobility seems to be about optimizations and maintaining the status quo rather than challenging it, although there are a few deviating and more critical voices. The smart mobility concept mobilizes actors and resources, but considering the ambiguities, these developments should be critically evaluated when proposed as solutions to transport issues and sustainability challenges.
Highlights
Increasing congestion, incidents, and lack of parking space put current mobility systems under pressure
In this paper, we are interested in the following research question: What is the meaning of the smart mobility concept in the Dutch context? We address this question by unpacking smart mobility for the Dutch case using two sources: news articles and websites of the initiatives
The second theme is about the solutions for car-related transport issues that the smart mobility concept brings forward
Summary
Increasing congestion, incidents, and lack of parking space put current mobility systems under pressure. The mobility sector faces severe sustainability related challenges to drastically reduce CO2-emissions, improve air quality, and address livability concerns. Scholars criticize existing solutions for falling short of addressing these challenges and call for a fundamental shift in the way mobility systems are organized [1]. In this light, smart mobility has received increasing attention, both in academic research and in practice. The concept emerged around 2010 in relation to a variety of information and communication technology innovations in the mobility sector and more technologically advanced and user-centric traffic management innovations [2,3,4,5,6]. In the discussions on transformative change, smart mobility is considered an alternative, more pragmatic, approach to the complex notion of sustainable mobility [6,10,11,13,14]
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