Barriers and Challenges in Developing Personal Mobility

Abstract

High hopes have been placed in the development of personal mobility. It loses in all situations of mass mobility for bus, tram, or train. More individual mobility lessens congestion, reduces emissions, and improves accessibility for less well-situated individuals. Whereas previous mobility revolutions brought advances for everyone, the personal mobility revolution is discussed with more caution. Mobility for everyone comes at the price of growing inequities regarding those who cannot or those who do not wish to participate. Hence, since the 1990s, the idea of assistive personal mobility has been proposed for individuals with mobility problems who are unable to use traditional aidesю The idea is to harness advanced technology to closely monitor the environment and assist the user in mobility. Questions about these developments, however, concern the conflicting expectations of what personal mobility can bring: the fear of losing control over one’s life vis-à-vis the hope of regaining lost control. In the paper, these conflicting expectations will be discussed, after a short introduction to the various planned developments of personal mobility. The key findings of this review paper are that these developments in personal mobility incur multiple barriers. Five barriers chain emergence and impact challenges: a lack of affordable and cheap products, a lack of professional care, a lack of user confidence, a lack of a supportive legal framework, and a lack of active user involvement in development. So far, the barriers to the development of personal mobility are not explicitly addressed, even though they are necessary to overcome in the transition from plans to integral strategies [2]. Having mapped the barriers, the paper explores already ongoing or potentially feasible strategies to overcome them through three claimed beneficial intersections with issues currently on the mobility agenda: the transition to an automated car-based transport system, the emergence of a future aerial mobility system, and the reduction of dependence on fossil fuels, which not only have climate but also mobility equity implications