Rural and suburban public transport remains at market shares about only 10-20%, representing a certain bottleneck for a comprehensive change of mobility behaviour towards ecologically and socially more sustainable modes of transport. The main reason for poor popularity of short-range public transport outside major cities are inherently unattractive time losses for access, waiting and transportation itself on a wide range of origin-destination trips.
Within the exploration study SynArea an innovative vehicle-sharing system, covering whole rural or suburban regions using light electric vehicles, which is optimally designed for this purpose had been examined. In SynArea II, there are two main objectives: The first one is to advance the development of the light electric vehicles up to a functional demonstrator for coupling and track true following, while the second one is to estimate the transportation demand forecast and examination of financial viability with improved precision.