Distrust as a Hazard for Future Sustainable Mobility Planning. Rethinking Employees’ Vulnerability When Introducing New Information and Communication Technologies in Local Authorities

The implementation of innovative technologies to support the planning and implementation of new transport schemes in cities requires staff to not only gain appropriate technical capabilities but also to have the willingness to adopt innovative technologies. Taking a sociotechnical approach, focussing on the Technology-Acceptance Model (TAM), we highlight employees’ distrust and unwillingness to become vulnerable as an additional challenge for Local Authorities (LAs) to cope with the introduction of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for mobility solutions in their transport departments. Using data from semi-structured interviews and workshops held across Europe (conducted as part of H2020 CIVITAS SUITS), two key indicators have been identified relating to the unwillingness of potential users to adopt new technologies for mobility solutions, i.e., incongruence of values and attribution of negative motives. Furthermore, we show behavioral intentions’ that indicate that users’ are not willing to become vulnerable and thus, provide evidence of signs that an organization can look for that may show that the likelihood of their technological implementation failing is relatively high. The practical guidelines provided at the end of the paper have been derived from our experiences of introducing new technologies for mobility solutions in partner cities of the SUITS project and highlight how users’ can be persuaded to ‘become vulnerable’ and actual using new technologies for future mobility solutions.