Regional urban and rural areas outside major metropolitan centres are facing escalating mobility challenges driven by declining socio-economic vitality and demographic shifts like population decline and ageing. Smart mobility innovations – including Autonomous Vehicles (AV), Demand-Responsive Transport (DRT), ridesharing, and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) – have attracted attention as potential solutions. Yet most scholarship on these innovations has focused on user acceptance or theoretical potential, offering limited empirical assessment of their actual problem-solving effectiveness. It remains unclear whether these smart mobility technologies can live up to lofty expectations about their benefits, especially in regional settings facing declining socio-economic conditions.
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