Are You Responsible for Traffic Congestion? A Systematic Review of the Socio-technical Perspective of Smart Mobility Services

Abstract

A large amount of the pollution of modern cities is caused by individual transportation. Hence, many road users suffer from stress, emissions and noise. Smart mobility services can help improving the situa-tion by distributing traffic more consistently across different routes, times, and transportation modes. These services comprise two dimensions, a technical and a socio-technical. The latter addresses the road user’s role as data and knowledge provider and stresses the road user’s role in actively contributing to relieved traffic. As such, road users display one of the strongest levers to sustainably relieve traffic both in terms of knowledge providers and traffic actors. Using a systematic analysis of 28 publications, we show that existing SMob services show several chal-lenges related to the involvement of road users. We call for more research on SMob services that account for long-term user involvement e.g. by positively in-fluences road users’ practices and routines.