Networking rural accessibility
Accessibility in rural areas is under pressure due to increasing travel distances and travel time to daily amenities, combined with a declining availability of public transport. While access to a private car enables participation in daily activities for most people in rural areas, it marginalises those without, raising concerns about transport justice. Multimodal integration of conventional public transport, demand-responsive transport, and shared transport services has emerged as a strategy to improve spatial and temporal coverage in low-density contexts. Mobility hubs facilitate transfers between trunk and feeder systems. Yet, their implementation is complex, requiring institutional coordination among public and private actors operating across modes and spatial scales.
This study examines the enabling conditions for effectively governing multimodal transport and integrated mobility hubs in rural areas. It develops a conceptual framework structured around functional interrelatedness, institutional interdependence, and spatial scale, which is applied in different stages of the policy cycle. Grounded in a pragmatist research philosophy, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach.
The findings indicate that multimodal integration in rural areas requires sufficient spatial scale, a balance between central coordination and local adaptability, and clique coordination to connect policy networks across modes and levels of jurisdiction, thereby enhancing rural accessibility.