Publications

Originating from her PhD research on Mobility as a Service (MaaS), Rita wrote a short article for the City Changers website on balancing the benefits and challenges of implementing MaaS in an urban context, providing a few practical steps towards a MaaS implementation.

A transportation system should be designed considering the relevant stakeholders’ needs for a fundamental transformation in travelling behaviour. This research aims to contribute to that by characterising the future network in response to the stakeholders’ requirements, using a systematic literature review paired with a grounded theory approach. Out of 39 reviewed publications, 13 transportation indicators were clustered into six dimensions representing stakeholders’ requirements for the transportation system. These results depict a stakeholder-informed land transportation system as a system of accessible and integrated mode services, which should be supported by policy and infrastructure, economically balanced, socially, and environmentally sustainable and rely on mobility-dedicated assisting features. Further research is proposed on (1) adapting these results to the legal, social, economic, and environmental contexts and (2) the ability of MaaS scenarios to answer the collected dimensions. This research is crucial to determine the areas of focus of a stakeholder-designed transportation system and to frame them in the mobility ecosystem, both individually and interlinked. Furthermore, its originality lies in (1) the application of this methodology to collect, analyse, and define a set of mobility investment priorities, and (2) the recognition of the relevant stakeholders in mobility considering their diverse perspectives and needs.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) integrates multiple transport modes into a single mobility service accessible on-demand. This research addresses the lack of empirical evidence to substantiate the service’s impacts by conducting a systematic literature review on MaaS trials in urban areas. A total of nine trials were reviewed, with MaaS impacts in diverse areas, from economic to environmental effects. Further research calls for long-term trials focused on environmental and political MaaS impacts. Even so, this review provides a foundation on the mobility-related areas that are important to target in future MaaS trials as well as the challenges that need to be addressed when an implementation of the service is attempted.

Research on evaluating sustainable transport policies is predominantly focused on their urban effects, often overlooking similar challenges in suburban and rural mobility. Therefore, the development of regionally integrated sustainable transport strategies becomes essential to comprehensively address these concerns. This study aims to bridge this gap by introducing a GIS-supported methodology that combines multiple linear regressions with hazard ratio models to quantify and map the impacts of environmentally driven regional transport policies on air pollution and human health. The main findings of an illustrative case study highlighted the importance of stronger efforts to promote the transition to shared and active transport and address the articulation between urban and rural mobility. This study offers a novel contribution to transport researchers and policymakers by proposing a methodology that (1) forecasts the impacts of regional transport policies using open data and software, ensuring its applicability for diverse regional settings, (2) provides the results in quantitative and visual formats, facilitating output analysis and visualisation and, consequently, decision-making and public consultation on proposed sustainable transport policies, and (3) sets the groundwork for including future transport-related dimensions.

In response to current environmental, social and accessibility challenges in the mobility sector, this research focuses on promoting the development of integrated sustainable regional transport policies, supported by a thorough analysis of their distributed economic impacts. This is fulfilled with the development of a new GIS-supported extension of a comprehensive methodology that is currently used for appraising local transport interventions. To illustrate the inputs and outputs of the expanded approach, a regional case study was simulated, highlighting the potential for this methodology to assist in (1) optimising the financial balance between electrification and modal-shift strategies, (2) anticipating and analysing the multiple economic impacts of multimodal transport services (e.g., Mobility as a Service) and (3) understanding how equal the benefits of these policies are across the region. This research will provide novel contributions to the field of transport research and policy development by introducing a comprehensive methodology that quantifies and maps the distributed economic impacts of regional transport policies. This will, consequently, enable the economic outputs of these policies to be easily visualised, analysed and shared with mobility stakeholders, fostering a better understanding of their urban–rural distribution, and promoting the strategic development of sustainable and equitable regional transport systems.