This issue of Transfers features five individual essays critically engaging with the promises promoted alongside new methods and purposes of mobility. Two essays, Martin Emanuel's “From Victim to Villain: Cycling, Traffic Policy, and Spatial Conflicts in Stockholm, circa 1980” and Andrew V. Clark and colleagues’ “The Rise and Fall of the Segway: Lessons for the Social Adoption of Future Transportation,” circle around a core theme of Transfers with their fresh look at transportation, its vehicles, and its methods; two others, Noah Goodall's “More Than Trolleys: Plausible, Ethically Ambiguous Scenarios Likely to Be Encountered by Automated Vehicles” and Gal Hertz's “From Epistemology of Suspicion to Racial Profiling: Hans Gross, Mobility and Crime around 1900,” look at mobility's social side. Fascinatingly consistent are the adjectives and adverbs that qualify the promises that are made for these technologies. Segways, for instance, were sustainable, enviro-friendly, shared. Smart, personalized, and robotic are some of the commonly invoked terms in the growing literature on this particular PMD (personal mobility device). Adverbial are the benefits of automated driving too: safe and liberating, both values desired by a nineteenth-century urbanized Austrian society that imagined the city as a space of settled inhabitants free of migrants and hence also free of crimes.

In “From Sickle to Pen: Women's Education and Everyday Mobility in Rural Pakistan,” Muhammad A. Z. Mughal explains how when advertising education to the rural female population of Pakistan the everyday was featured as a public space, participatory, inclusive, and of economic benefit too: equal and ethical. In their sum, these individual essays open the view on a theme of research still being explored. While an expansive literature nowadays exists in which mobility studies scholars have addressed the “revolutionary” character attributed to modern social and technical mobility schemes, its assessments—that is, the language that blossoms around mobility's promises and failures—is developing, too. In particular, as engineers and the public debate over the sustainability of modern travel, and students in Fridays for Future weigh technocratic solutions against restraint and eschewal, asking, if not for the end of mobility, then at least for new forms—such adverbial attributions, their historical change, social specificity, and political and economic use require sensitive research. When is transport actually deemed as facilitating, or as hindering or disruptive? In their think piece for Ideas in Motion, “Oceanic Travels, Future Voyages for Moving Deep and Wide within the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm,’” Kimberley Peters and Rachael Squire make a timely argument as to how mobility studies “have gone to sea,” and now include oceans and waterways. Navigating oceanic mobilities, above, under, and through the depths, Peters and Squire give us a taste of some of the economic, social, and environmental developments and the directions mobility studies should look out for.

The current debate about mobility's future places “sustainability issues” center stage and as such allows Mobility scholars to contribute with their expertise and academic insights to a global debate of utter relevance. History, arts, and humanities studies are important voices in inequality debates, when virtual and physical mobility is weighed against each other and politicians or activists discuss whether it is better to stream and dream or move and groove. Looking at the language of mobility's reality on its own terms also throws us back to mobility studies’ current approach to revolution per se: what it constitutes in the first place and what its inherent qualities should be. Is a mobility revolution a forceful collective effort leading to an unknown future, as French actors termed the social upheaval in their country in 1798? Should mobility's revolutions be rational or emotional, less or more radical, continuous, rapid or slow, from below or above? Decades into city and transportation planning, field studies have attempted to test and evaluate responses to mobilities, by grades of numbers or adverbial attributions of excellence or failure, subtle renderings were seen following the rationality of a distinctive value system. We may want to consider that actions of and reactions to mobility have not only a history of rhetoric but, as Ute Frevert has suggested for other fields, an emotional history too.