Digital Platforms and the Future of Urban Mobility: Metadata and Documentation, 2020-2023

Hodson, Michael and McMeekin, Andrew and Lockhart, Andrew (2025). Digital Platforms and the Future of Urban Mobility: Metadata and Documentation, 2020-2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857441

Digital platforms are pervasive. In 2015 every one of the top ten trafficked US websites was a platform and platform businesses hold each of the top eight spots in Chinese web traffic rankings. Many platforms that are being experimented with appear to be reconfiguring urban services. That is to say, they are disrupting the ways in which urban services and systems such as mobility, energy, water and waste are currently organised.

Urban platforms pose challenges and opportunities for many areas of urban life. Here we focus on one domain of urban platforms, urban mobility, where a large number of platforms are emerging in different ways and to a variety of ends in particular places. These include, for example platforms that focus on ride-hailing (e.g. Uber), journey planning (e.g. CityMapper), on-demand bus services (Vamooz), mobile ticketing and fare management (JustRide), carpooling (Faxi), and bicycle sharing (BIXI).

While there is much debate about digital platforms in general as a macro phenomenon, much of this is 'place-blind' and consequently misses much of what is happening on the ground in different urban areas. The overarching aim of the research is to understand how digital mobility platforms are re-shaping city-regional transport systems and their governance - and what the geographical and social implications, opportunities and challenges of this are. To address this aim, the project has four objectives:

1. To critically analyse the various global trajectories of urban platform innovation and how they are imagined and organised;
2. To assess how knowledge and policy associated with these various urban platform innovation trajectories circulate between urban contexts;
3. To investigate how these trajectories combine and embed in city-regional contexts and with what implications for socio-spatial re-organisation;
4. To develop pathways to societal impact via city-regional transport strategy and policy and through wider public debate on urban transport policy and the future of urban mobility.

We plan to integrate the research findings into a contribution towards the overarching aim of the proposal, i.e. how and why global trajectories of urban platform innovation combine and embed in specific city-regional contexts. The integrated findings and how this can help us to anticipate the future of urban mobility, will be presented in a book-length monograph.

As well as having significant implications for academic debate, the proposed emphasis on mobility platforms and city-regional restructuring is equally significant to city-region transport strategy and policy development - especially given the fast changing and highly unpredictable characteristics of this innovation area. The UK national government recognises the future of mobility as a critical challenge and English city-regions and other sub-national areas as key places for 'fostering experimentation and trialling' (DfT, 2019). Through both its Industrial Strategy (IS) White Paper and its Future of mobility: urban strategy, Government seeks to position the UK as becoming a 'world leader' in shaping the future of mobility as we are 'on the cusp of a profound change in how we move people, goods and services around our towns, cities and countryside' (HM Government, 2017, p.48).

Those engaged in city-regional transport policy are faced with profound challenges about what the future of urban mobility looks like and require up to date, policy-relevant research that identifies current mobility patterns and how various new urban mobility service innovations may reconfigure these to meet strategic priorities and current and future mobility needs. Through building relationships with city-regional policymakers, addressing this research need has the potential to contribute to closing a knowledge gap for policy development.

Data description (abstract)

Relationships between (often private) digital mobility/transport platforms and cities and urban contexts have become better understood in recent years. Much work has focused on individual or small number of platforms and their relationship to a particular city or small numbers of cities. Less well-developed is i) understanding of what the implications of multiple (often dozens) of digital mobility/transport platforms are for existing metropolitan public transport systems and ii) for how urban and metropolitan public authorities can shape the platformisation of metropolitan public transport systems.

To build better understanding of these issues, the data collection strategy of this project involved 1) a programme of documentary analysis and 2) a programme of 74 semi-structured interviews. The documentary analysis involved documents grouped as: ‘Greater Manchester other case study material’; ‘Greater Manchester public authorities’; ‘Intermediaries, consultancies’, ‘Miscellaneous’, ‘National government and agencies’; ‘North East other case study material’; ‘North East public authorities’; ‘Platform providers’ (with sub-categories of: ‘Car-share and car clubs’; ‘DDRT’; ‘MaaS and journey planning’; ‘Micro-mobility’; ‘Public transport operational and RTI’; ‘Ride-hailing’; ‘Ticketing and payment); ‘Traditional transport providers’; ‘West Midlands other case study material’; ‘West Midlands public authorities’. Interviews were undertaken with multiple representatives within metropolitan transport authorities, including in areas of strategy and innovation, digital transformation, bus reform, future mobility, infrastructure, and ticketing, with national level policymakers, various platform companies, transport operators, local authorities and academics.

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