Developments to promote sustainable mobility require active and effective public participation projects in which the form of participation (e.g., consulting citizens), the objective of the project (e.g. harnessing local knowledge), and the indicators to assess if the project was effective (e.g., participants’ evaluations) are aligned. In practice, this alignment seems to be rare, but scientific research backing up this claim is lacking. For this scoping review, we have collected and analyzed peer-reviewed case studies on public participation projects for sustainable mobility in 14 countries. Per case, we identified forms, objectives, and effectiveness indicators and assessed their level of alignment. Our main findings show a wide variety of participation forms, of which consultation was the most dominant. Cases also often had multiple objectives, and many projects included measures to evaluate their effectiveness. Most relevant and in line with what we assumed, almost all of the projects demonstrated a degree of misalignment between objectives and effectiveness evaluation standards. Although these results do not imply that public participation projects in sustainable mobility are not effective, it does seem to suggest that participation can benefit from a more structured and aligned approach.

Visioning has been widely adopted in transport planning as a method to support explorations of possible future transport systems over a long time horizon. There are vast variations in how visioning is applied but given a clear association between visions and the long-time perspective, it is unclear how these processes handle uncertainty surrounding the resulting visions and their implementation. This study reflects on previous visioning processes by systematically reviewing the scientific publications on participatory visioning in passenger transport. The review identifies possible improvements contributing to a systematic approach that produces concrete visions and actions to deal with uncertainties surrounding the vision and its implementation. We address these improvements by proposing a robust and generative visioning framework, which combines the generative approach in Appreciative Inquiry (Ai) and methods to handle uncertainty in the Dynamic Adaptive Planning (DAP). The framework is illustrated in a case study of the Southwest area of the Dutch city of the Hague that involved over 50 participants in a survey and two workshops. The process produced a vision for the mobility system of the area, a set of measures to realize it (i.e. pathways), and concrete actions to ensure that the pathways are robust against different futures that can affect the implementation. The approach can help planners, policymakers, and researchers in designing a visioning process that helps participants to better appreciate the temporal dimension of the visioning process and improves their awareness regarding the need to safeguard policy interventions against possible impacts of (un)certain future events.

Game theoretical models can be used for social simulation of real-world systems. These models describe the interaction between actors who have to make a decision. Before application of those models, the game concept that describes the situation at hand needs to be selected. Selecting the right game concept is crucial when choosing a model to simulate the process, but not trivial. In this paper we present a taxonomy of game concepts to select a set of suitable models.