It is increasingly recognized by scholars and governmental, industry and community practitioners that changes such as decarbonization are needed for the transportation sector –with its outsized responsibility for urban air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and congestion– to align with long-term sustainability goals. In recent years, electric vehicles (EVs) have been presented as one of the transformational technological solutions to our sustainability challenges.3 Cities, with their concentration of peopl However, transformations do not only involve new technological innovations, but also new markets, user adoption and practices.6,7 Among these, the unequal socio-spatial contexts shaping mobility are a critical, yet relatively underexplored, dimension. This project uses a micro-urban social typology (MUST) framework to examine the factors shaping socio-spatial variations in adoption and mobility; and the implications of socio-spatial inequalities on technology adoption and the sustainability of urban mobility. We define MUSTs through a combination of normalization and agglomerative clustering techniques to show how socio-spatial variations in adoption and outcomes are shaped by the interplay of socio-demographic, economic, technological, environmental, and governance (SETEG) factors. Then, with a focus on 22 large metropolitan and 14 metropolitan in the U.S. states of California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and the District of Columbia, which for simplicity, we refer to as the 10-states, we calculate prevalent patterns in prevalence of MUSTs across cities Results/Conclusions We find that the adoption of EVs is a rare occurrence across MUSTs. The highest and lowest income groups in our study are, respectively, the primary early adopters of EVs, and the main users of alternative transportation modes. This suggests that an emphasis on EV adopters, who often dwell in low density areas and have the means to afford mobility innovations, will lead us to overlook the wider spectrum of factors shaping mobility needs and outcomes across and within cities. Addressing socio-spatial differences in sustainable and just ways requires technological innovations tailored to differing mobility needs, ranging from electrification of transit and micro-mobility to electrification of private vehicles, which have the potential to sustainably realizing the promises of decreasing GHG emissions, reducing congestion and improving the health of people and ecosystems.
