Voices of the Future: How Public Perception Will Shape the Future of Mobility
When new transport technologies arrive, their success rarely depends on engineering alone. Long before autonomous vehicles appear on city streets or air taxis take to the skies, a quieter process is already underway — people are forming opinions, doubts, expectations, and hopes.
Dr Eeshan Bhaduri is tuning into that conversation.
As part of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship–funded Next Generation Travel Behaviour Models (NEXUS) project, working with Prof. Charisma F Choudhury, Dr Bhaduri is exploring how public perception shapes the real-world future of emerging transport technologies — from autonomous vehicles (AVs) to urban air mobility (UAM).
His focus is not just on whether people will use these technologies, but what underlying factors shape their perceptions, how it evolves over time, and why are they different across the world.
From streets to systems
Dr Bhaduri’s interest in mobility began not with futuristic vehicles, but with everyday transport challenges. His doctoral research developed a sustainable framework for ride-hailing operations in India, examining how such services reshape urban mobility and environmental outcomes. The most notable contribution of his dissertation is development of a policy-evaluation triad encompassing emissions, travel demand, and business viability, as this approach transcended the traditional siloed methods of evaluating each element, leading to feasible ride-hailing operation policies in the Global South context.
Later, during his first postdoctoral role at ITS with Prof. Jilian Anable and Prof. Zia Wadud, his attention turned to the adoption of both privately owned and shared autonomous vehicles in the UK — and its potential to decarbonise transport sector. Across both contexts, one pattern stood out.
Perception is dynamic. It builds over time, reacts to events, and varies from place to place
“Inherent perception about these futuristic alternatives play a critical role in their acceptance, something which is dynamic as well as a complex interplay of social, cultural, behavioural and economic factors.” Yet most traditional travel behaviour models treated perception as something fixed and often suffer from a priori assumptions regarding the set of influencing factors.
“That mismatch stayed with me,” Dr Bhaduri reflects. “Perception is dynamic. It builds over time, reacts to events, and varies from place to place. But we didn’t yet have robust methods to study it properly till artificial intelligence (read foundation models) opened up a new world of opportunities.”
A new lens on behaviour
Those tools are now emerging. Since joining the NEXUS project in October last year, Dr Bhaduri has been working at the intersection of data science, artificial intelligence, and behavioural modelling — using methods capable of capturing how public sentiment evolves in real time and across the globe. At the heart of the work is large-scale, long-term social media data. Rather than viewing online discourse as noise, Dr Bhaduri treats it as a rich — if complex — mirror of public perception. Using machine learning and large language models, alongside time-series analysis and spatio-temporal clustering, his research tracks how discussions around AVs and UAMs rise, fall, polarise, and shift across countries and over time. What emerges is a far more nuanced picture of public acceptance than traditional approaches allow.
What the Public Is Really Saying
One of the clearest findings from the research is that public perception is never uniform. In some countries, people are more vocal and polarised; in others, opinions are more neutral, reflecting the role of contextual factors. Both patterns matter during the nascent stages of adoption and what matters more is identifying underlying drivers associated with it.
Across countries, attitudes toward autonomous vehicles and aerial mobility technologies are shaped by a combination of global narratives and local experience. For instance, there exists certain global themes for AVs, ones which appear consistently and more frequently in public discourse (e.g., safety concerns, industry investment, clean energy, and automation in freight) — their prevalence varies by context indicating differential acceptance of the autonomous future among the general masses.
If perception varies by place and over time, then policies, services, and communication strategies need to vary too.
Similarly, for UAMs, public discussion tends to cluster around innovation, testing, unmanned aviation systems, and potential mobility benefits. Interestingly though, in many places, specific local events, such as a public demonstration or a prototype flight — have a stronger influence on sentiment than generic global themes.
“If perception varies by place and over time,” Dr Bhaduri notes, “then policies, services, and communication strategies need to vary too.”
From Insight to Action
These insights have direct relevance beyond academia.
By revealing how trust and acceptance form in different social and cultural contexts, the research equips policymakers, regulators, and industry stakeholders with evidence to design more targeted, context-sensitive interventions — rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches.
Potential users of this research include national regulators such as the UK Department for Transport, as well as mobility service providers developing autonomous or on-demand transport services.
The academic response has also been strong. Dr Bhaduri’s AV-focused work has been published at Transportation Research Part A, with UAM research has been published at Journal of Air Transport Management— both leading journals in the field.
Internationally, the work has been shared at multiple international conferences- 105th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, Washington DC, USA in January this year and Euro Working Group on Transportation conference in Edinburgh last year.
Why It Matters
Ultimately, Dr Bhaduri’s research is about more than just modelling behaviour, instead it aids ‘just’ transition through a data-driven framework. By accelerating the responsible adoption of cleaner, more efficient transport systems, the work supports:
- reduced congestion and emissions,
- improved air quality,
- inclusive and equitable transport planning
- and more liveable cities.
It also aligns closely with global priorities, contributing to:
- SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities
- SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
- SDG 13 – Climate Action
- SDG 3- Good Health and Well-Being
Reading the Road Ahead
As cities prepare for autonomous vehicles and urban air mobility, the success of these systems will depend not only on technical readiness, but on whether people are willing to trust them.
By listening carefully to how that trust forms — across cultures, over time, and in response to real events — Dr Eeshan Bhaduri is helping ensure that the future of mobility is shaped not just by algorithms and hardware, but by human experience.
Photo by Bram Van Oost on Unsplash