The discourse on sustainability in transport policy is characterized by beacons of hope. Beacons of hope are the secularized form of the religious savior, the messiah sent by God, from whom we expect salvation on Earth. In recent decades, there have been a whole series of such beacons that have been touted as solving all traffic problems in one fell swoop. Car sharing, for example, has been promising for more than 30 years to replace private cars and support sustainable transport development through the collective use of a car component, but to this day it continues to eke out a niche existence and, according to even the most optimistic forecasts, will not make a significant contribution to sustainable transport development in the foreseeable future (ifmo 2016). This was followed in the 1990s by the first wave of electromobility, which disappeared after a few years just as quickly as it had arrived on the scene, before the electric car was rediscovered in 2009 and a second e-mobility hype began (Schwedes 2021). Ten years later, we find ourselves still at the beginning of a development that we already know will not contribute to sustainable transport development if everyone drives a private electric car in the future, instead of dispensing with the private car. Then, in the 2000s, the upcoming, younger generation appeared to many observers as a beacon of hope because they allegedly did not want to obtain a driver’s license or drive a car, which the numbers still do not verify. More recently, the digital revolution in the transport sector has been hailed as a beacon of hope for sustainable transport development, and anyone who formulates objections to autonomous driving, for example, has been castigated as a heretic. The latest savior, however, is a product of the so-called platform economy and is called ‘Mobility as a Service’. With their private business models, its representatives promise customers any desired mobility service from a single source and, of course, once again sustainable (Docherty et al. 2018).
