Transportation and Technology in Rural Denmark: Communities of Mobility

Abstract

Rural areas have experienced little attention in HCI research, much less rural areas in high income and developed countries. We investigated how digital technologies have influenced mobility in rural areas, through interviews with 19 people living or frequently traveling in rural areas of the North Region of Denmark. We found that rural mobility was predominantly centered around access to private cars, however it was also characterised by often being multi-modal. We present several ways that technologies played a role in coordinating mobility across public and private transportation modes. We found that communities of mobility existed on different levels; household, neighborhood and local area. We explore the conditions for suitability of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) initiatives in a rural area context, as we discuss two distinct contradictions that emerged from our findings and relate them to research challenges that we see for future development of digital technologies for rural mobility.