Passenger travel by car currently accounts for a significant part of greenhouse gas emissions, but reducing dependency on the car in rural areas while ensuring accessibility is challenging. This study offers a user perspective on the constraints to fossil-free mobility in a remote rural area of Sweden, drawing on focus group discussions with inhabitants of six rural settlements.

The study took place in Västerbotten and Norrbotten, Sweden's two northernmost regions where the climate is sub-arctic, population density low, and car dependence high.

It explores constraints including the shift from personal and individual responsibility for transport to more collective solutions. Both contextual and individual aspects impact on people's ability to change, including social networks, working arrangements, socioeconomic preconditions, and personal flexibility.

Reducing the use of fossil fuels for personal transport is challenging in rural areas where car dependency, long distances, and a lack of services and collective travel solutions are common. The transition is proving slow, as many people see cars as essential to fulfilling their needs and therefore a potentially car-less future as restricting their accessibility. One perceived obstacle to the transition is security, or perceived safety, which is the focus of this paper.This study examines the conditions for replacing fossil-fuel cars for personal transport with any alternatives leading to lower CO2 emissions, exploring what shapes rural people’s needs of this transition, focusing particularly on their security and safety concerns.The empirical material comes from focus group discussions with civil servants and rural inhabitants in the sub-arctic north of Sweden which is one of Europe’s most sparsely populated areas. The results show that based on current conditions relying on only alternatives to the fossil-fuel car in rural areas would lead to insecurity, and that concerns about security affect rural inhabitants’ choice of transport mode. In addition, whether or not alternatives to the fossil-fuel car are perceived as broadly feasible seems to be affected by a small proportion of the journeys individuals make, in this study referred to as boundary-setting trips comprising “tough journeys”, “journeys out of one’s control”, and “journeys affected by the unexpected”.

This study focuses on the transition towards “fossil-free” (meaning fossil fuel-free) passenger transport in rural areas. We identify enablers for travel behaviour change through alternative transport and accessibility solutions from a bottom-up/traveller perspective, reducing the current knowledge gap and adding nuances to our existing body of knowledge. Rural environments are particularly challenging with long distances, inadequate accessibility to services, and limited public transport. As fossil fuel cars are the dominant means of achieving essential accessibility for many rural residents, maintaining accessibility with alternative solutions in connection with the transition to a sustainable transport system is vital. The study was conducted in Västerbotten and Norrbotten, located in Northern Sweden, Europe’s most sparsely populated area. The empirical material consists of focus groups with rural inhabitants and (separately) civil servants, and material gathered from various other transport-related projects. The results identify five enabling themes: motivation, personal and local community, opportunities and adaptability, expectation or anticipation of the transition, and physical proximity. The research material was analysed through social innovation theory, meaning that the changes under consideration were not only seen from the perspective of simple technical changes in transport but also as a complex social process moving towards changing travel habits.