Maximising PT Ridership and Passengers’ Satisfaction in Žilina, Slovakia

Public transport and shared mobility services are widely acknowledged as the backbone of sustainable urban transportation in terms of reducing traffic congestion, air pollution and noise, and increasing traffic safety. These services play pivotal roles in achieving the objectives of the EU Cities Mission and the European Green Deal ambition of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Alongside this, the evolution of emerging mobility concepts is also transforming the future of the mobility landscape, which imposes a paradigm shift towards smarter carbon-neutral mobility services. Therefore, the development of smart sustainable mobility solutions and ensuring improvement of customised mobility services for all citizens are key challenges for the cities of tomorrow. All of these require experimentation besides nudging people’s mobility behaviour towards sustainable and climate-friendly choices of transport modes, especially in Central and East European cities with a high tendency for car ownership and use of private cars for daily commuting.

With a twofold objective of raising public transport ridership and passengers’ level of satisfaction with collective and public transport systems, this paper focuses on presenting various mobility-related solutions and measures and the implementation of the most promising ones through utilizing co-creation process for improvement of public transport service features and their smart integration with existing shared mobility services. The case study is provided for the city of Žilina as one of the twining cities in the Horizon Europe SPINE “Smart Public Transport Initiatives for Climate-Neutral cities in Europe” Innovation Action project. 

Despite the city of Žilina’s public transport being a cornerstone of the urban transport system, private cars still hold a high share of the city and region’s modal split for daily commuting into and out of the city. The city strives to increase its PT share by 30% compared to the baseline and users’ satisfaction by 25%, in the years 2023 to 2027. An ambitious plan for the co-design, development, and deployment of push and pull measures has been defined. 

Based on co-creation efforts and the integration of smart solutions, existing PT services will be integrated with new smart mobility options, focusing on user-centred measures. For the successive learning regarding inclusive user-centred design of measures and accelerating uptake of offered solutions, the city of Žilina will also take advantage of the SPINE collaborative network of Living Labs fostering transferability and replicability of gained knowledge and experience across lead and twinning cities horizontally (“cross-pollination” activities) and vertically from lead city to twin cities (“twinning” activities).

Location: Žilina

Start/End date: 2023/2027

The produced impact

The implementation progress and the impact of all envisaged solutions for the city will be measured and monitored using a set of 7 predefined key performance indicators: modal share, PT ridership, users’ satisfaction, access to mobility services, congestion, air pollution and noise pollution. 

Quantitative data, such as passenger occupancy, delays, ridership, and environmental indicators, will be collected alongside passenger satisfaction surveys to evaluate user experience. The Smart City Platform will integrate these data and provide dashboards to monitor the performance of the implemented measures and support evidence-based decision-making. In addition, citizen feedback gathered through Living Labs, pop-up exhibitions, and the Citizens App will help assess behavioural changes and the acceptance of new mobility services. With the project still in its implementation phase, these KPIs constitute the project’s future evaluation.

Key lessons learnt

The project aims to demonstrate how combining digital tools with co-creation and design thinking can effectively encourage behavioural change toward public transport. It also expects to generate transferable knowledge through collaboration between Living Labs and twinning cities, supporting the replication of successful mobility solutions across Europe. Finally, the authors state that future data collection will provide a better understanding of how digital mobility solutions influence travel behaviour, passenger satisfaction, and sustainable transport adoption, enabling more robust conclusions and practical recommendations.