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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between public transport services and the financial needs. Cities require to be equipped with public transport networks as they are primarily responsible for creation of wealth for countries and to ensure sustainability of urbanization. Once decisions have been taken to design, build and operate such networks, it is equally important to set rules for urban transport financing. Depending on the city size and other factors, authorities allocate resources. Nonetheless, is there a relationship between the size of the city and its public transport financial needs? This paper develops a model to explain such relationships.

The study develops a spatial model, while providing intuition through the use of graphs, to solve the question of the amount of resources allocated for financing the transport services.

It is verified that those financial needs are more than proportional to the size of the city; when a city grows in its number of boroughs, economic funds needed to support public transport have to increase in a greater proportion in comparison to the growth of boroughs growth. The model states a formula valid for explaining the financial needs.

The model is interesting as it explains why large metropolitan areas need special financial aid from authorities. Real life shows that big cities like Paris, Berlin or Madrid need extraordinary funds for this purpose, and in most of the cases, specific national laws are required for financing public transport networks in these large metropolitan areas.

This paper aims to define the efficiency achieved by urban transport companies in Spain concerning the resources they use, considering the type of management used for implementation, public-private, and size.

This study consisted of an analysis of the efficiency of 229 public-private urban transport operators during the period 2012–2021 using Data Envelopment Analysis, the Malmquist Index and inference estimators to determine productivity, efficiency change into Pure Technical Efficiency Change (PTECH), and scale efficiency change.

Based on the efficiency analysis, the authors concluded that of the 229 companies studied, more than 35 were inefficient in all analysed periods. Considering the sample used, direct management is considered significantly more efficient. It cannot be concluded that the size of these companies influences their efficiency, as the data show unequal development behaviours in the studied years.

This study provides arguments on whether there is a significant difference between the two types of management in the urban transport sector. It also includes firm size as a study variable, which has not been previously considered in other studies related to urban transport efficiency. Efficiency should be a crucial factor in determining funding allocation in this sector, as it encourages operators to optimize and improve their services.

With the popularity of mobile devices and new technologies, such as NFC, mobile payment, which is taking the place of credit cards and cash as the chief payment method, is attracting more and more attention. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the main determinants of mobile payment use intention and proposes a model of mobile payment adoption, integrating mindfulness as a major factor.

Data for the study were collected through an online survey of a representative sample of 414 users in the United States and 380 in Spain. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to verify the validity of the variables and the relationships among them.

The results showed that mindfulness, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, subjective norms and attitude have significant influence on mobile payment use intention.

The present study is based on samples from only the United States and Spain, which limits generalization of the results. The notion of mindfulness is new in mobile payment adoption research, so future studies should analyze in more detail and in depth its effect on these adoption processes.

This is the first study to incorporate mindfulness into a mobile payment adoption process. Incorporating mindfulness complements traditional variables to show how users address the adoption process (e.g. novelty seeking, engagement, anxiety, attention paid).