Anticipation of urban mobility futures beyond adoption: User segmentation across scenarios in two pioneering Chinese cities

With the advancement of autonomous driving and sharing solutions, future mobility is expected to offer a multi-faceted experience, connecting individuals to their built environments and communities. Ensuring an equitable and smooth transition amid technological and societal uncertainties is a key challenge. This interdisciplinary study seeks to develop a nuanced understanding of the heterogeneous needs of urban residents through segmentation based on their preferences across four possible future mobility situations in two pioneering Chinese cities: Shanghai, a global innovation hub, and Suzhou, a strategic satellite city. Moving beyond traditional adoption-focused models, we emphasize users' anticipated broader benefits of future mobility, especially relating to quality of life. Based on a previous study identifying preferences and perceptions on future mobility, we conducted two separate cluster analyses of responses from 1968 participants. The results revealed that user heterogeneity transcends conventional models, with segments prioritizing privacy, economic pragmatism, or technological enthusiasm, most of which preferred the most transformative mobility future (shared autonomous vehicles). Shanghai's dense, transit-rich environment fosters greater acceptance of shared automated mobility among affluent users, while Suzhou's decentralized structure and dispersed land use produced a unique additional segment of Tech-Aspiring Public Transit Riders. This study underscores the imperative for human-centric, context-sensitive approaches to mobility planning that critically account for user heterogeneity and local urban characteristics. Future mobility may foster societies that are as inclusive as they are innovative.