What is Public Mobility?

A journey rarely uses one mode. Someone leaves home on a shared bike, takes a train across the country, and finishes the last two kilometres in a ride-hailed car. Each leg works well enough on its own. The joins between them usually do not: separate apps, separate accounts, separate tickets, and nowhere to establish in advance whether the whole chain will actually hold together today.

Public Mobility is the term FINOMAD uses for integrated mobility services that treat the whole journey as the unit of design. Ride-hailing, public transport, shared bikes and cars, ride sharing and parking are planned, booked and paid for as one thing, with the traveller — and not any single operator — at the centre.

The choice of words is deliberate. “Public” points at who the system is for, and at who is able to take part in building it, rather than at who happens to own the vehicles. A Public Mobility system can be assembled from private operators; what makes it public is that the connecting layer is open, and that the needs of every traveller, including those entitled to social transport, are designed in rather than added afterwards.