Neighborhood telecommuting centers (NTCs) are professional workplaces located in residential areas that offer a closer alternative to long-distance commuting. By integrating telecommuting with mobility services, NTCs have the potential to support sustainable travel behaviors, reduce commuting burdens and alleviate space constraints for organizations. This paper adopts a longitudinal, mixed-methods living-lab approach to examine factors influencing NTC use compared to employer offices and home offices. Data from a real-life NTC living lab in Stockholm, Sweden, were analyzed using a three-week time-use diary (27 participants; 572 day-level observations) and panel regression models to identify determinants of workplace choice. Qualitative interviews were used to contextualize inconsistencies between participants' expectations and actual usage. Findings indicate that NTCs can reduce commuting times and provide a professional environment closer to home; however, adoption is constrained by organizational norms, logistical barriers and continued reliance on private cars for trip-chaining. The results suggest that embedding NTCs within mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) like frameworks, through coordinated workplace access, public transport subscriptions and micromobility solutions, while aligning employer policies and institutional practices, is critical for supporting hybrid work models and advancing sustainable urban mobility.

In Autonomous Public Transport (APT), particularly with shuttle buses, passengers travel in smaller, more intimate vehicles—and in the future, such vehicles may operate without an authoritative driver or host. This setup may lead to potential safety concerns, as passengers are left alone together. Additionally, this future absence of a driver or host means that there is no one to address questions or uncertainties that may arise. One proposed solution is introducing a robot onboard the bus, serving a similar role to a human host. To explore this solution, an experiment was conducted in Barkarby, Stockholm, Sweden. Passengers, generally unfamiliar with APT or social robots, experienced two short rides on a bus equipped with either an embodied Furhat robot as the host or a disembodied voice agent in the ceiling. Data were collected from passenger-agent interactions, post-questionnaires, and semi-structured focus group interviews. Results indicate a division in passenger preferences, with some favoring the robot and others the voice assistant. Passengers asked more questions to the robot, suggesting a clearer affordance for interaction. While the questionnaires did not show significant differences, passenger behaviors indicated that they anthropomorphized the robot more. The interviews revealed that passengers felt more secure with a human operator and doubted the robot’s authority during incidents with aggressive passengers or accidents. Our findings show that social robots can help make autonomous buses feel more welcoming and interactive. Future APT systems have many design issues that need to be resolved before riders can find them safe and appropriate to use, and social robots can play a role in resolving such issues—both the ones we see today, and potentially ones that will appear in the future.

Autonomous Public Transport (APT) is a developing innovation with the potential to transform our current transport systems. APT can potentially provide an affordable, safe, and convenient travel solution for daily travel. Recent studies in the field of APT have identified that among several concerns, safety, and trust played an important role in positively impacting user acceptance of APT. A potential solution to address some of these concerns is integrating “Social Robots” into APT. By creating agents that are designed to be distinct entities from the autonomous vehicle, designed to interact with humans socially and intuitively, these robots can potentially improve passenger experiences and the perceived level of safety for the passenger. This could help to build trust in the technology. Using existing literature, this paper explores the benefits and drawbacks of integrating social robots into APT, including improving passenger satisfaction, safety, and efficiency, as well as privacy and security issues.

The transport sector is changing significantly as cities grow and technology reshapes travel preferences. Inadequate public transport and rising car ownership present growing challenges, particularly in rural and suburban areas. On-demand public transport offers a promising solution by integrating the latest technologies and user-centric design to deliver flexible, adaptable services that meet diverse and evolving user needs. However, trust and reliability, digital exclusion, car dependency, and limited service availability must be addressed to ensure inclusive, sustainable mobility systems.

This report focuses on X-linjen, an on-demand public transport service operational in Säffle since 2022, studied as part of a project led by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in collaboration with RISE, Nobina, and Värmlandstrafik. The project applies participatory design methods, informed by social practice theories, to engage both users and service providers. The goal is to identify user needs, develop inclusive solutions, and encourage sustainable travel habits, ultimately contributing to societal development. Key findings highlight the need for improvements to app usability, clearer communication about virtual bus stops, and optimized schedules to better serve seniors and other user groups. Integration with existing public transport networks and targeted outreach campaigns are essential for expanding adoption and building trust, particularly among non-users.

Insights from Scandinavian peers—Plustur in Denmark, Kutsuplus in Finland, and Ruter in Norway—offer valuable lessons on balancing innovation, cost-efficiency, and user-centered design. The report provides actionable recommendations to refine X-linjen’s service design, scale it to other regions, and address financial sustainability. By implementing these solutions and overcoming existing barriers, X-linjen can serve as a model for inclusive, flexible, and sustainable rural mobility, bridging critical gaps in access while fostering long-term societal and environmental benefits.

In mid-2023, we performed an experiment in autonomous buses in Stockholm, Sweden, to evaluate the role that social robots might have in such settings, and their effects on passengers' feeling of safety and security, given the absence of human drivers or clerks. To address the situations that may occur in autonomous public transit (APT), we compared an embodied agent to a disembodied agent. In this video publication, we showcase some of the things that worked with the interactions we created, and some problematic issues that we had not anticipated.

Digitally enabled neighbourhood telecommuting centres (NTCs) in residential areas may have the potential to reduce the environmental burdens of transport by shortening work trips and enabling modal shifts. This paper presents the results of a Living Lab where 67 participants were given access to an NTC. Through this Living Lab, this study identifies several conditions required for an NTC to substantially reduce commuting and overall have a positive impact on sustainable travel. The results indicate that while a small group of participants who lived very close to the NTC made significant lifestyle changes and adopted more sustainable travel practices, the overall changes in the sustainability aspects of travel for most participants were minimal. The majority of the participants merely exchanged a day spent working from home for a day at the NTC, as they were only allowed to be absent from the employer’s office one day per week. Further, some participants found it difficult to work remotely due to organisational roles and workplace norms. Another factor that limited the sustainability effect of the NTC was that most participants normally commuted by train, but in a few cases travelled to the NTC by car. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, most participants were required to work exclusively from home, which proved to have both positive and negative effects on the participants’ everyday lives and well-being. The participants reported a radical shift in attitudes towards remote working during this period, which they believed could lead to remote working becoming more common after the pandemic. In this case, NTCs could possibly play an important role in enabling this shift, by remedying some of the identified drawbacks of working from home. This could in turn enable a larger reduction in commuting. In areas where more people commute by car, sustainability effects would likely be greater.

While telecommuting (TC) research heavily discusses travel impacts of home-based TC, little is known about impacts of working from a neighborhood TC center on travel and non-travel activities and their energy requirements. We conduct a case study on the impacts of the work location (employer's office, TC center, home) on time use and travel using data collected in a neighborhood TC center in Stockholm. Our results show that telecommuters more frequently replaced working from the TC center for working from the more distant employer's office than for working from home. On TC center and home office days, diarists spent less time traveling, and on home office days more time on chores and leisure than on employer office days. When working from the TC center instead of the employer's office, telecommuters frequently used the same or more energy-efficient commute modes, e.g. biking instead of the car, which was feasible because the TC center is in the local neighborhood. However, when working from home, diarists mainly used the car for private travel. Thus, energy savings of TC can be increased by providing energy-efficient transport options or local access to non-work destinations to telecommuters. TC energy impacts depend also on changes to energy requirements for nontravel activities, for space heating/cooling/lighting at all work locations, and systemic TC effects (e.g. residential relocation), which can only be observed in the long term. Thus, future TC assessments should take an even broader perspective in terms of travel and non-travel activities, their energy requirements, and systemic effects.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is considered a strategy that can provide potential solutions for a sustainable transport system. The current literature claims that MaaS can deliver net positive impacts for the transport system. However, whether these impacts are marginal or significant is unclear, as estimations typically are based on a few pilot tests. The lack of understanding of these impacts could create barriers for decision-making on policy and regulation in adopting MaaS strategy. The paper proposes a feasible evaluation to explore how and to what extent MaaS leads to, for example, reduced emissions, reduced fossil energy consumption, reduced car ownership and vehicle kilometres travelled on a large scale. The aim of this paper is to provide potential values of MaaS impacts based on analysis of future scenarios. The potential values of MaaS impacts can be used to support decision-making within both public organisations and among service developers for MaaS implementation and development.