Can we design mobility services by accounting for complexity and social justice?

Recent convergent development of sensing, computation, and communication technology is enabling the advent of self-driving vehicle (SDV) technology. Moreover, general advances in digitalization and smartphone use are enabling the advent of mobility services, exemplified in a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept. Considering the potential societally-wide disruption stemming from SDV technology and MaaS,
a need arises for simultaneously considering the development of mobility technologies and services. In the spirit of Value Sensitive Design, as socio-technical systems, mobility system design has to account for underlying behavioural aspects alongside the technological interdependencies. Moreover, in the spirit of liberal theory of justice, mobility system design has to account for how advantages and disadvantages will be distributed among users. The objective of this research is to provide a proof of concept for possibility of such a design approach. The basis for this research is a version of Priority System (PS), developed as integrated mobility and traffic management framework. Based on the explicit formulation of complexity and social justice requirements, PS provides an opportunity for the user to select a Priority Level for her trip, in addition to destination and route. Moreover, PS includes a scheme of non-monetary Mobility Credits, and has a direct relations for SDV control at the intersection, route, and network level. In addition to elaborating PS, in order to evaluate the prosed concept, we have used a web-based experimentation with human subjects interacting with a version of PS. Thus, this paper focuses on development of web-based experimentation
for allowing user interaction with PS. In addition, this paper will present the information collected from web-based experiment. Findings include in-depth insights into human decision-making within the proposed
mobility management framework. In addition, the paper presents a summary of respondents’ comments related to proposed management framework and technology in general. Finally, the paper presents a
summary of results, conclusions, and recommendations for further research, emphasizing upon the need for understanding human decision-making and potential in using web-based environment for further
participatory development of both SDV and MaaS technology.