It’s Not Just About Local Governments
Autonomous Mobility Needs a Regional Perspective
Autonomous mobility doesn’t fail because a single local government doesn’t know what it wants. It often fails because mobility systems operate beyond municipal boundaries.
This raises the next question: Who actually needs to work together to turn a pilot project into a viable public service? The answer is clear: it’s not just the municipality. What matters is coordination between the city, the county, the transit authority, the operator, the infrastructure, and regional demand patterns.
The federal government explicitly describes autonomous mobility not only as a topic for urban test areas, but as a building block for new mobility services in rural areas and regions far from urban centers. This shifts the focus away from individual locations and toward regional mobility networks.
Especially in public transportation, the impact extends beyond municipal boundaries. Relevance arises where mobility chains function: between home and train station, between hospital and residential neighborhood, between the outskirts and the center, between rural areas and the existing public transit network. The Handbook on Autonomous Driving in Public Transportation highlights precisely this connection. It treats autonomous services as part of integrated transportation planning and emphasizes their integration into existing service and spatial structures.
An international perspective: Norway, too, explicitly views transportation as a function of interconnected regions. The national transportation plan states: “We need to connect urban and rural areas and the people who live there.” This aligns perfectly with the central thesis of this blog: autonomous mobility becomes relevant when it is not viewed in isolation but rather as part of a cohesive regional mobility network.
Source: https://www.regjeringen.no/en/documents/national-transport-plan-2022-2033/id2863430/?ch=1
Anyone who plans autonomous mobility solely at the local level therefore risks a structural misunderstanding. The real challenge is not merely operating a vehicle within a specific area. The actual task is to better organize regional mobility: with clear interfaces to existing public transit, with appropriate operating areas, with coordinated operating hours, and with services that improve real-world mobility connections.
Autonomous mobility becomes relevant precisely where it meaningfully complements the existing transportation system: as a feeder service, as a flexible connection between neighborhoods, and as a way to fill gaps where traditional scheduled service alone is insufficient. But this service logic only works if it is not conceived in isolation at the local level, but rather from a regional perspective.
What is often underestimated here is that as the operating area expands, it is not only organizational complexity that increases. The demands on the technical control of the vehicles also rise.
In a pilot project, the system is usually geographically limited, manageable, and implicitly safeguarded in many respects. In regional operation, however, a distributed system emerges: multiple vehicles, different operational areas, varying road and environmental conditions, more interfaces, and fewer implicit fallback mechanisms.
This makes the follow-up question from Blog 1 even more pressing: How can vehicle movement remain controllable—not just within a test area, but across distributed regions?
For with each additional region, not only does the system’s range grow, but so does the complexity of coordinated vehicle movement. Different infrastructures, changing traffic conditions, and multiple vehicles operating simultaneously mean that control is no longer a local issue but a fleet-wide system challenge.
Bitkom also argues along these lines. The association calls for larger model regions and larger operating areas because the key insights for scaling and cost-effectiveness do not arise in small-scale individual cases, but in larger, real-world application contexts.
This has direct implications for political accountability. Of course, local governments remain important. They understand local needs, land use, stop locations, and levels of public acceptance. But they are only one part of the system. As soon as autonomous mobility is to become more than just a visible pilot project, regional coordination is needed: between public authorities, transit authorities, operators, technology partners, and regulatory bodies.
Anyone who envisions autonomous mobility as a public system must redefine the space. Not as an isolated test bed, but as a networked mobility ecosystem. Not just at the local level, but regionally. And at the same time as a distributed, safety-critical system in which control must be ensured not locally, but system-wide.
If autonomous mobility is to scale up seriously in public transit, it must not be held back by administrative boundaries. The future of public transit will be decided where regions link services, share responsibility, and organize mobility as a system.
