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The aim of this thesis is to compare and analyse the introduction of renewable fuel in the public transport sector, focusing on the challenges and opportunities encountered by involved stakeholders on the regional and local levels. The results contribute to answering three research questions: 1) How do organisational factors and local and regional contextual factors influence the introduction of renewable fuel? 2) What are the challenges and opportunities of using green public procurement as a policy tool to introduce renewable fuel in the public transport sector? 3) How do the challenges and opportunities regarding the introduction of renewable fuel differ depending on the type of renewable fuel? Four papers are included in the thesis. Paper I compares and analyses how factors identified in green public procurement research (strategies, requirements, cost, size and knowledge) influence the choices made when introducing renewable fuel in two Swedish regions. The findings show that the influence of the factors is highly case-specific and that differences in their strategic approach caused regions to express requirements for fuel differently in tender documents. Functional requirements were used by the public authorities to increase the share of renewable fuel in a cost efficient way and at the same time allow room for flexibility and leave more control to the operators. Specific requirements were strategically used to create local markets for biogas, which poses higher demands on political backing, knowledge by the public authorities, and an acceptance of increased costs. These findings were further elaborated in paper II, where introduction of renewable fuel in ten more Swedish regions was studied. The results confirmed to a large extent the challenges and opportunities from paper I. Further, regions that had introduced another renewable fuel than biodiesel had either used specific requirements or introduced the fuel in publicly operated bus services. The scope of paper III complements the findings by looking more in detail at how environmental requirements have been expressed, by performing a content analysis of Swedish tender documents. The results show that size of the procurement and type of traffic influence how environmental requirements are set. Further, both ambitious functional requirements and specific requirements for fuel are more common in large tenders in city traffic – this confirms and exemplifies the importance of context when renewable fuel is introduced through public procurement. In paper IV, the focus is solely on the introduction of electric buses by comparing experiences in Sweden and England. It was concluded that most challenges are case-specific on the city level, for example, passenger demand and bus route characteristics, but also financial and regulatory support from the national government can have an influence. Additionally, the relationship and division of roles between involved stakeholders are central to overcome challenges in all cities. Overall, this thesis concludes that green public procurement can be successful for introducing renwable fuel. By expressing requirements differently in the tender documents, public authorities have been able to influence the introduction to a varying degree which has led to different challenges and opportunities for the involved stakeholders as well as different outcomes for renewable fuel. Nevertheless, introduction of emerging technologies (eg. electric buses) was shown to be a challenge when public transport was procured. Alternative introduction strategies were seen for electric buses, such as test projects, introduction under current procurement contracts, increased collaboration between stakeholders and more responsibility to cover for uncertainties taken by the public authorities. In summary, the challenges and opportunities of introducing renewable fuel are highly case-specific and strongly associated with the specific fuel in question.

This PM is written within a K2-project on changed conditions for public transport during Covid-19, with particular focus on costs and revenues and measures made by public transport authorities to mitigate the challenges. The PM presents the main data collected about the Amsterdam case. First it explains how public transport is organised in the country and in Amsterdam, indicating who is responsible for funding, planning, and delivering these services. Afterwards, the report describes the repercussions of Covid-19 in the Dutch PT sector with a look into main challenges and concerns brought by the pandemic across three thematic dimensions: the operations of PT, PT funding, and the future of PT.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a digital concept that centres on integrating traditional public transport offerings with other types of mobility services such as carsharing and ridesourcing. In recent years, MaaS has become a much-discussed topic within the public transport industry since proponents of the concept argue that its rise will disrupt the current role of public transport authorities and increase the attractiveness of public transport. This chapter aims to give an overview of what MaaS is and what its prospective diffusion may imply for public transport authorities and public transport systems. To do so, a definition of MaaS is first provided, followed by a brief review of expectations on how MaaS will influence traditional public transport. A framework that describes different pathways to governing MaaS developments is introduced next and is subsequently used to analyse and discuss how public transport authorities in Finland, Sweden, and Norway have approached MaaS thus far. The chapter ends with some recommendations on how governments can support and shape MaaS developments based on the experience to date.

Bus priority measures are introduced in cities in order to improve travel time, frequency, and reliability, thereby benefiting the passengers and establishing a more attractive and competitive public transport system. Since first being implemented in Chicago in the late 1930s, bus priority measures are now widely applied across the globe, and a plethora of measures regarding priority in terms of time and space are currently in place. The main challenge for planning and implementing bus priority measures is the conflict over space with other societal purposes and road modes, in particular the car. In addition, the introduction of bus priority is often planned and implemented in a context of institutional complexity, which contributes to making such efforts a challenging task. In this article, political leadership, collaboration, alternative funding schemes, guidelines, and action plans are suggested as important instruments to handle these challenges.

The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of goal conflicts between various policies in the transport sector and their distributional impacts. This aim is broken down into two research themes: 1) What are the distributional outcomes of the transport system?, and 2) How do different actors incorporate distributional considerations into the allocation of infrastructure investments?. This thesis comprises of four papers. Papers I and II relate to the first theme and Papers III and IV to the second. In Paper I we study whether income explains why some choose to travel with public transport using single tickets when their cheapest ticket is a monthly travel card. We investigate this using the Swedish national travel survey and find a positive relationship between travel card possession and income among those for whom the monthly card is the cheapest ticket. This effect is present among individuals with annual incomes up to SEK 230 000. Our main explanation for the seemingly irrational behaviour is real or perceived liquidity constraints. In Paper II I study the effect of accessibility on other markets, in this case the market for food. Specifically, I study how accessibility explains variations in the price of food in supermarkets. I find a U-shaped relationship with higher prices in low and high accessibility locations and lower prices in medium accessibility locations. I attribute the higher prices in low accessibility locations to local monopolies and the lack of economies of scale. The higher prices in high accessibility locations I attribute to the location of a store being a quality for which people are willing to pay a premium in order to reduce travel costs in combination with congestion in stores. In Paper III we investigate how the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) compiled the draft 2018-2029 plan. We do this by studying which qualities of individual investments that explain inclusion probability, complemented by interviews with planners. The qualities we find influence inclusion probability is if the investment have a positive net benefit investment ratio, which have a positive impact, and the presence of negative, non-quantified environmental effects, which have a negative impact on inclusion probability. None of the parameters relating to the variables meant to capture distributional considerations are significant and the only distributional consideration that surfaced during the interviews were that each of Sweden’s 21 regions should each get at least one investment. In Paper IV we conduct a choice experiment to solicit the public’s preferences for aggregate benefits and distributional outcomes in the context of infrastructure investments. The distributional dimensions included are geography, gender, and income. We also conduct latent class analysis to capture heterogeneity. In general, individuals prefer infrastructure packages that entail large benefits and even distributions, however, if the benefits are unevenly distributed, they prefer those that favour non-metropolitan regions, women, and low-income earners. The groups revealed by the latent class analysis highlight different parts of the overall results. Finally, I argue that the interpretation of these results depends on whether accessibility hold instrumental or intrinstic value.

Traffic accumulated by cars is responsible for considerable problems in our cities. The problem is partly about the negative effects on human health due to harmful particulate emissions, noise, traffic accidents and sedentary lifestyles, partly about the space it occupies, which leads to congestion, and the fact that valuable land is taken up by road infrastructure and parking lots. In a bigger perspective, car traffic also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.
At the same time, the car is ingrained in our way of life and a necessity for many people's lives to function. Politicians are therefore generally reluctant to limit car use, and as a result, transport planners find it difficult to enforce measures that lead to a significant reduction in car traffic. Attempts are being made with soft measures that encourage people to walk, cycle and take public transport. These measures can, for instance, be to inform about alternatives to car use, marketing new cycle routes, and offering free trial periods with public transport. So far, it has proved difficult to sufficiently evaluate these measures, which has led to scepticism about their usefulness. At the same time, we need to know more about what it is that motivates modal shifts for different groups. Thus, more knowledge about soft measures is needed.

Innovations in the form of smartphones and electric bicycles (e-bikes) have opened new opportunities for soft measures, both in terms of evaluation of these and the potential to influence car use. Furthermore, previous research has shown that it is important to target soft measures and adapt information and marketing to specific target groups, also called segmentation. Against this background, this thesis (including five individual papers) has examined smartphones, e-bikes, and marketing. These three elements have been used in variation to investigate motivation to reduce car use in favour of walking, cycling and public transport, segmenting and targeting, as well as evaluation of soft measures.

Regarding the possibility of smartphone applications to influence travel behaviour,
explored in the first paper, a review of previous research showed that there is potential but that too few studies have been conducted to be able to draw any general conclusions. The paper found that applications need to be customised to the user, provide relevant information and feedback about the user’s behaviour, create a commitment towards its use, and have a user-friendly design. The second paper presented a process evaluation of a project where an application was developed to facilitate sustainable business travel. However, the study showed several weaknesses with the application and the difficulty in evaluating the effect of such a soft measure, which gave lessons about both study design and the development of applications and their implementation in organisations.

In the third paper, we found that marketing for sustainable travel is more motivating if it is aimed at the collective rather than the individual, and contains altruistic messages linked to the environment and health. The respondents’ stated motivation to reduce car use reflected their current car use and attitude towards the environment and various means of transport. This underlines the importance of adapting marketing to the target group. The fourth paper showed that one’s morality towards the climate has a significant impact on the motivation to reduce car use, but habits, travel time and attitudes towards car and bicycle use also play a role. Such factors differ between gender, age, level of education and between urban and rural areas and may be important for the segmentation used for soft measures.

The results from the fifth paper showed that e-bikes have exciting potential to replace the car and contribute to more sustainable travel behaviours. In a field experiment where the participants consisted of frequent drivers, car travel measured in distance decreased by an average of 37% as a result of the participants gaining access to their respective e-bike. The share of cycling of total travel increased by just over 20% on average. The participants measured their travel behaviour and answered survey questions using their smartphones, which contributed to high data quality. Both the effect evaluation of the use of e-bikes and the use of smartphones to measure travel behaviour make a novel and important contribution to the research field on soft transport measures, and the application of these in practice.

The thesis concludes that innovations have great potential to improve soft measures, both as a means for contributing to increased sustainable travel behaviours and as a means of making more rigorous evaluations. The thesis also contributes to the knowledge about how sustainable transport can be marketed, what creates motivation to reduce car use, as well as different perspectives on segmentation and which target groups soft measures can be aimed at.

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between spatial-temporal patterns of vehicles types and numbers in different urban functional zones and traffic-related air pollutant emissions with real-time traffic data collected from traffic surveillance video and image recognition. The data were analyzed by using video-based detection technique, while the air pollution was quantified via pollutant emission coefficients. The results revealed that: (1) the order of traffic-related pollutant emissions was expressway > business zone > industrial zone > residential zone > port; (2) daily maximum emissions of each pollutant occurred in different functional zones on weekdays and weekends. With the exception of expressway, the business zones had the highest emissions of CO, HC and VOC on weekdays, while the highest emissions of all the pollutants (CO, HC, NOx, PM2.5, PM1.0, and VOC) were at the weekend. The industrial zone had the highest emissions of NOx, PM2.5 and PM1.0 on weekdays; (3) pollutant emissions (CO, HC, NOx, PM2.5, PM1.0 and VOC) in all functional zones peaked in the morning and evening peak except at port sites; (4) cars and motorcycles represented the major source of traffic-related pollutant emissions. Collecting data through video-based vehicle detection with finer spatio-temporal resolution represents a cost-effective way of mapping spatio-temporal patterns of traffic-related air pollution to contribute to urban planning and climate change studies.

For the provision of efficient and high-quality public transport services in rural areas with a low population density, the introduction of Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) services is reasonable. The optimal design of such services depends on various socio-demographical and environmental factors, which is why the use of simulation is feasible to support planning and decision-making processes. A key challenge for sound simulation results is the generation of realistic demand, i.e., requests for DRT journeys. In this paper, a method for modelling and simulating commuting activities is presented, which is based on statistical real-world data. It is applied to Sjöbo and Tomelilla, two rural municipalities in southern Sweden.

Exploring the need for a sustainable transport paradigm, which has been sought after by local and national authorities internationally over the last 30 years, this illuminating and timely Handbook offers insights into how this can be secured more broadly and what it may involve, as well as the challenges that the sustainable transport approach faces. The Handbook offers readers a holistic understanding of the paradigm by drawing on a wide range of research and relevant case studies that showcase where the principles of sustainable transport have been implemented.

In this chapter, the authors will summarise the entire book and look ahead. The aim of this book has been to take the calls for governance of smart mobility one step further by analysing and discussing current and future policy instruments to govern smart mobility. The task has been carried out by discussing the why, how and what of policy instruments. So far, the policy instruments governing smart mobility to a large extent are focussed on understanding this new field of mobility, establishing relations and roles between companies and authorities, and making the field governable. What is lacking in this equation are policy instruments that establish the population as citizens with rights, voices and roles. In order to align the smart mobility transition and the transition towards a sustainable society, the authors consider the development of deliberative citizen participation an important initiative and the authors suggest it as an important field for future research.