The public-interest digital mobility paradigm

Source abstract

Digital platforms, data infrastructures, and algorithmic decision systems increasingly shape access to urban transport and influence urban mobility behaviours. Yet policies in the 'smart mobility' era frequently frame these systems as neutral instruments of efficiency and improved travel experiences, leaving questions of rights, power, and accountability under-specified. This paper explores how transport policy can govern platformised mobility as public-interest infrastructure rather than as a purely market-led innovation domain. The paper develops a new transport policy paradigm through critical interpretive synthesis and operationalises it through a governance stack, policy architecture and evaluative test. The Public-Interest Digital Mobility (PIDM) paradigm reframes digital mobility systems as contested infrastructures that allocate opportunities, risks and voice through data and algorithms. PIDM highlights (i) public value outcomes, (ii) rights and accountability for data- and algorithm-mediated decisions, and (iii) multi-level governance across municipal, national and supranational settings. It identifies recurring failure modes (i.e., opacity, exclusion, dependency, sustainability rebound, labour precarity and surveillance harms) and maps them to points in a governance stack of service operations, data, algorithms, interfaces and work allocation. The contribution of this paper is integrative and analytical: (i) it connects transport policy paradigm debates to platform governance and public values scholarship, (ii) extends evaluation beyond sustainability to include data rights, market power and labour, and (iii) offers a coherent design logic (i.e., governance stack, policy architecture and evaluative test) that can be used to compare and design regulatory packages.