Public transport is becoming increasingly intelligent. AI-enabled services can help passengers receive better travel information, improve accessibility, increase comfort and support safer journeys. At the same time, these developments raise important ethical questions around how we ensure that passenger-aware services respect privacy, remain fair and inclusive, and maintain passenger trust.
For OptiPEx, ethics is not treated as a separate activity that takes place after technology development. Instead, ethical considerations have been integrated into service design from the beginning. The aim is to ensure that the future services we are designing are not only technically feasible but are also ethical, in the sense that they are considered to be trustworthy, acceptable and beneficial by passengers. In order to do this, OptiPEx conducted an ethics assessment of the passenger-aware public transport service concepts we are developing.
Key ethical considerations
The the results of this assessment highlighted four central principles that public transport users feel need to be considered when it comes to the ethics of passenger-aware AI services. These include:
- Privacy and data protection: Services should collect only the information needed for their intended purpose and use privacy-preserving approaches whenever possible. OptiPEx promotes aggregated and event-based approaches instead of continuous monitoring of identifiable individuals.
- Fairness and inclusion: Public transport must serve diverse passenger groups, including older adults, people with disabilities and users with different digital capabilities. Services should improve accessibility and inclusion without creating new barriers or unequal treatment.
- Human oversight: OptiPEx research shows that passengers are generally more willing to accept AI when it supports people rather than replaces them. Human involvement remains particularly important in situations related to safety, assistance and emergency response.
- Transparency and trust: Passengers are more likely to accept new technologies when they understand how technology works, what information it uses, and what benefits it provides. Clear communication is therefore essential for building trust.
Ethics shaping OptiPEx service design
These takeaways have been used to inform the design of all OptiPEx service concepts in various ways. For example, OptiPEx’s sensing technologies do not pursue individual emotion recognition, passenger profiling or other forms of intrusive passenger monitoring. Instead, the project focuses on technologies that interpret indicators of emotion and de-personalized monitoring methods. To learn more about how we are doing this in each of the services we are developing, head over to the OptiPEx Solutions page here.
Overall, the work that OptiPEx is doing to integrate ethics into service design from the start, demonstrates that AI-enabled public transport services can still be inclusive and trustworthy.
