New services, new travelers, old models? Directions to pioneer public transport models in the era of big data

The ubiquitous availability of information is arguably the distinctive feature of the 21st-century developed world. The organization of flows affects our lives increasingly more than the organization of spaces. However, even in the digital era, not everything is digital. Therefore, highquality transportation systems are still a crucial asset for our contemporary network society (Castells, 2010). Information and communication technology (ICT) is radically changing our concept of mobility, causing a shift from the regime of the automobiles to the regime ofmultimobilities, where travelers can easily swap between physical and virtual mobility and traveling is not alternative to doing something else (Lyons, 2014). The traditional “system-based” demand, in which travelers buy tickets for specific means of transport, progressively gives way to a new “service-based” demand, where travelers purchase bundles of mobility services defined by different levels of waiting time, reliability, comfort, and price. Private cars become less important. Millennials, the prevailing cohort of travelers in the not-so-distant futures, like public transport because it offers opportunities for digital socialization and work. Besides more reliability, they ask for user-friendly real-time information and provision of WiFi (Sakaria & Stehfest, 2013). Sharing information, as well as sharing resources, seems to be the characteristic of the future mobility. As a consequence, the definition of “public” transport is also evolving. Public does not mean owned or regulated by a public body any longer: A few clicks in the Uber website and your car becomes a taxi; register with BlaBlaCar and you start providing a service to the general public. Public transport is not necessarilymass transport, either: Santander bikes in London and bikes and cars of any sharing scheme in the world are