Colaborative public transport in rural areas

Purpose and goal

The purpose was to develop and test collaboration between public transport, private individuals and platform actors that offer the collaborative service ride sharing in rural areas. Ride sharing and the need for mobility services would be highlighted from a user, organizational, business model and environmental perspective. The purpose is fulfilled despite the test period and the users´ perspective was limited in two case studies due to the pandemic. Business model and implications for all parties in a public, private, peer-to-peer collaboration require further development.

Expected results and effects

The results have already contributed to and will continue to do so for platform actors´ and RKM´s continued work with accessibility and MaaS in rural areas. An important lesson for RKMs is to better build on local needs in their regions and that ride sharing and MaaS need to be tested in slightly larger towns in rural areas, in combination with an expanded call-controlled public transport. Incentives for sharing resources and using ride sharing and MaaS need to be tested and also included in the business model. Both business and organizational models need to be further developed.

Planned approach and implementation

Collaboration has worked well in the project and with the parallel project KomILand. Had it not been for the pandemic, the four case studies could have provided more user data (requests for services, obstacles and opportunities to use them, the possible significance of the organizational form for the users). More real travel data would also have been collected. Despite the pandemic, we still got a lot of results. It is difficult to test MaaS services during a pandemic and answers to surveys are difficult to get if they are not distributed and answered on the spot, or sent via the platform app.