Entrepreneurial Innovations in Last-Mile Mobility and Public Transport Adoption for Sustainable Urban Mobility: A Qualitative Thematic Review With Evidence From Mumbai

Adoption of public transport has become central to India's sustainable urban mobility agenda in the face of rapid urbanization, rising private vehicle ownership, and worsening congestion. This is especially evident in Mumbai, whose suburban rail and bus network carries millions of commuters daily yet suffers from overcrowding, first- and last-mile gaps, and a declining modal share among discretionary users. To consolidate what is known about the determinants of public transport adoption and to examine how these determinants interact with the entrepreneurial ecosystem of mobility start-ups and technology ventures, this paper adopts a qualitative research design built on a systematic review and thematic analysis of published literature. Purposeful identification and analysis of peer-reviewed articles, institutional reports, and doctoral sources published between 1989 and 2025, using a thematic-synthesis procedure, yielded seven recurrent themes: behavioural and attitudinal factors, service quality and satisfaction, safety and gender dimensions, infrastructure and accessibility, sustainability and environmental motivation, technology and digital adoption, and entrepreneurial innovation in last-mile connectivity. These themes are integrated into a conceptual framework proposing that entrepreneurial mobility innovation improves the conversion of favourable commuter perceptions into actual public transport use in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). The paper offers theoretically derived propositions and a literature-grounded framework rather than field-tested results, and it explicitly acknowledges the absence of primary survey or interview data as a boundary condition of its conclusions. To provide a preliminary empirical cross-check on this literature-derived framework, the paper additionally reports a supplementary structured survey of 100 Mumbai commuters, whose descriptive and correlational results are broadly consistent with the proposed propositions, particularly the role of entrepreneurial last-mile ventures in supporting public transport use. With implications for mobility entrepreneurs, transit agencies, and policymakers, the paper concludes by outlining how the proposed framework can be empirically validated in future research using quantitative, survey-based methods such as structural equation modelling.