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• Final European Student Parliament • Copenhagen Moderator: Martin Hoffmann

Future Mobility – New approaches in the city

Mobility has many facets. How do we want to move along in the future? Is the e-car really the solution or is the concept „car“ already out of date? Which ways of locomotion and hence which transport routes will have priority in future urban planning? Is the mobile workplace really a concept for tomorrow?

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The topic

Prof Malene Freudendahl-Pedersen, Denmark

Our Future Mobility expert is Prof Dr Malene Freudendal-

Pedersen (Roskilde University, Department of Environmental,

Social and Spatial Change). She focuses her research on

mobilities in late modern everyday life. With a point of

departure in transport research she examines why and how we

choose specific modes of transport in everyday life and the

meaning and significance this has for lived life. Mobility

behavior cannot be understood though, from a narrow

understanding of everyday life when it is produced and

reproduced on multiple societal scales. Thus important to her

research is also looking at sustainable mobility as a possible

future utopia.

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The expert

Contents 1. Understanding cities

2. Relevance of mobility

3. Current challenges

a. Growth

b. Urbanisation

c. De-Urbanisation

d. Gridlocks

e. Climate Change

4. Concepts for Future Mobility

5. Tools of Mobility

6. Side issues with relevance

7. Aim of Future Mobility

8. Food for thoughts

9. Further Research

10. References and Picture Credits

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The content of this preparation material was prepared by Martin Hoffmann.

Understanding cities To change mobility, we need to understand the underlying patterns

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Understanding cities

• Cities are man-made; and thus an expression of culture.

• The way they are shaped both represents and influences the overall process of social organization and social change.

• We are now living in a network society, characterised by simultaneous spatial concentration and decentralization.

• Our cities are made up, at the same time, of flows and places, and of their relationships – cities as communication systems.

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Understanding cities

• Societies are produced, and spaces are built, by conscious human action; there is no structural determinism.

• As an example, participation of women in the labour market or organisation of child care influences time and space of citizens and thus their mobility needs.

• Digitalisation and globalisation are no reason for interconnection, they are merely an expression of desires and needs.

• Thus, those places with connecting best with global economy will receive higher interest in investment and management.

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Relevance of mobility Stop thinking in cars, think in flows of people, goods and information

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Relevance of mobility

• Transport happens for a purpose, not just for the "fun" of it.

• City workers are responsible for creating a disproportionate amount of global GDP. By 2025, their contribution is expected to total 86 %.

• Earlier research found a strong linear relationship between global transport levels and real Gross World Product (GWP) over the years 1950 till 2000.

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Current challenges Cities are the new countries

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Current challenges – Growth

• Today, 64 % of all travel kilometres made, are urban and the amount of travel within urban areas is expected to triple by 2050.

• By 2050, the average time an urban dweller spends in traffic jams will be 106 hours per year, three times more than today.

• The population of the world is set to grow from 7 billion today to 9.2 billion by 2050.

• The proportion of the global population living in cities is expected to rise from 51 % in 2010 to 70 % by 2050.

• Demands for energy and raw material will rise accordingly.

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Current challenges – Urbanisation

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Current challenges – Urbanisation

• The density of city centres are rising as more people are moving there.

• Their traditional fragmentation into areas for living, working and production are dissolving, creating "multi-use areas".

• Mainly, it is the population in less-developed countries, which is changing.

• Mega-trend of urbanising which is based on and demands mobility.

• Potential to put in the infrastructure early for people to develop their mobility patterns.

• Currently, a third of the global city population is living in precarious living conditions, such as slums.

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Current challenges – De-Urbanisation

• With urbanisation comes de-urbanisation, as some city areas are favoured over other city or rural areas.

• For example in Germany, shrinking cities, a phenomenon thought to be confined to the states that made up former East Germany, is increasingly plaguing former Western states.

• With shrinking population and urbanisation, we have to reduce infrastructure, not only but in particular in mobility.

• There is an observable split between attractive and less attractive living spaces creating a possibly irreversible fragmentation.

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Current challenges – Gridlocks

• Urban mobility systems will come under growing strain, with congestion increasing and travel speeds declining.

• Unless the modality split can be shifted in favour of public transport and walking/cycling accidents and fatalities will increase.

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Current challenges – Climate Change

• In 2010, the transport sector was responsible for 22 % of the global CO2 emissions worldwide.

• Global transport related CO2 emissions are expected to increase by 57 % in the 2005-2030 timeframe, representing the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

• Future energy supply can not be based on a single energy source.

• Climate change is unlikely to occur in a predictable, linear fashion.

• The recognition of climate change has not been serious yet.

• Other sectors of energy supplies will be deprived and cause air and noise pollution.

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Current challenges - Climate Change

• The rapid decrease in availablity of fossil fuels, as well as the focus on sustainablity and environmental protection are catalysts for innovation across many industries.

• Example: Modern Ford cars are actually not more fuel efficient than the T-model Ford.

• Improvements to vehicle efficiency are not enough if very large emission reductions are needed.

• Without careful planning, mobility systems will remain major generators of greenhouse gases and thus significant contributors to climate change.

• Continuation of high-mobility lifestyles in the OECD, and even their spread to the rest of the world, is a possible future, but not very likely.

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Perspectives What modern mobility could be like.

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Perspectives for future mobility

• Sustainability will become an increasing key factor in the way urban mobility systems of the future are designed.

• This means: environmentally friendly mass transit must win out over individual motorised transport.

• However, its services must remain affordable for all citizens.

• Clear correlation between the use of innovative mobility concepts on one hand and mobility effectiveness and efficiency on the other hand.

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Shift in car-ownership • Diametral trends can be observed:

• Today, we have around 1 billion cars on the streets, and in 20 years it will most likely be 2 billion.

• Yet, particularly former multi-car households are reducing their ownership (e.g. London from 21 % in 2001 to 17 % in 2007).

• People no longer automatically associate mobility with owning a car.

• The role of car is beyond mobility: status, aspiration, comfort, convenience. However, the car is losing its relevance as a status symbol.

• The different modes of transportation (including the possibility to rent different cars for different occasions) reflects cultural development: especially young people increasingly re-create their identity and ownership according to social movements.

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Connecting flows, not increasing movement

• Instead of mono-locomotion, people are mixing modes of transport what they need when they need it

→ “smart mobility”

• The accessibility and combination of different modes of transportation is supported by mobile computing, which makes transition between different transport seamless.

• Mobility – the free flow of information, people and goods – enables modern society.

• Mobility of the future has to be understood as an interconnected issue, that no industry or stakeholder can be isolated from.

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Networking

• With cities becoming smarter, energy and mobility have to follow.

• We need a thinking shift from moving vehicles to moving people and goods.

• The social and functional diversity of the metropolitan region requires a multi-modal approach to transportation.

• This means: mixing private automobile/highway system with public metropolitan transportation (railways, subways, buses, taxis) and local transportation (bicycles, pedestrian paths, specialized shuttle services).

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TOOLS OF MOBILITY A+B+C=M?

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Arthur D. Little created a mobility index with cities all over the world.

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Mobility index – Modes of transport

• Successful cities, such as Hong Kong, have a well-balanced split between different forms of transport that move people away from individual motorised transport.

• Cities that promote walking, cycling, bike sharing, car sharing and smart mobility cards as part of an integrated mobility vision and strategy do reduce travel times, fatal accidents and carbon emissions.

• City size does not have a significant influence on the mobility score.

• However, the two other city characteristics indicated, namely city prosperity and the prevalence of public transport (‘modality split’), do have a significant influence on the mobility score

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Mobility index – New models of mobility

• There are 39 key technologies and 36 potential urban mobility business models. However, these solutions are not being applied comprehensively.

• The management of urban mobility operates globally in an environment that is hostile to innovation as regards investment and long implementation

• Rethink the system: Cities in mature countries with a high proportion of motorised individual transport need to fundamentally redesign their mobility systems.

• Then, they can become more consumer and sustainability orientated.

• Knowing the nature and needs of your mobile population is a key first step to putting in place a networked solution which will suit all parties.

• What is needed is an informed openness to what is available and the flexibility and imagination to innovate as required.

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New models of mobility

• Besides the attitude of the customers, mobility is an interdisciplinary field that can never be seen from only one perspective; transport, infrastructure, traffic management, information.

• Important trends of our time, including the information revolution, urbanisation and globalisation reflect changing patterns of mobility.

• Developing countries and their cities can work as test bed for new, sustainable and intelligent mobility solutions.

• Even if a perfect solution can be found for a metropolis, implementation can not be done at once.

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New models of mobility

Arthur D. Little also mapped various urban mobility technologies, looking where we stand

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Social Aspects Mobility is for people

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Social Aspects

• The dominant factors affecting future mobility solutions are technological trends.

• Development of high quality office-to-office-communication is going to change the way business is conducted.

• Digitalization of the working environment eventually culminating in a reduction of business-related travel.

• Distance sales facilitated by a ubiquitous internet, promising to serve aging populations, but they can also lead to a decreasing need of shopping-trips.

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Social Aspects

• The question of how an entire generation used to being mobile will actually stay mobile with increasing age will become more pressing.

• Increasing individualization of work, social relationships, and residential habits.

• Gradually shifts sociability from family units to networks of individualized units (most often, women and their children, but also individualized co-habiting partnerships), with considerable consequences in the uses and forms of housing, neighborhoods, public space, and transportation systems.

• We need to shift our focus from the provision of ever-expanding vehicular mobility, to the human needs that it is (presumably) meant to satisfy

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Aim of future mobility So, where do we go from here?

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Aim of future mobility

• A new system based on a socially and ecologically sustainable world-view would see a reversion back to non-motorised (or active) transport and public transport.

• The new system would entail some replacement of vehicular transport energy by human effort-a partial reversal of the trend established by the Industrial Revolution.

• Some present benefits of private travel would be lost, such as privacy and the psychological benefits of driving, but the change would bring its own benefits.

• The mobility of the future relies on proactive control: all infrastructures can be connected and data will tell us about the position of objects and their relations.

• These smart cities have to be designed along the individual needs of cities and their inhabitants.

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Aim of future mobility

• thisbigcity proposes six simple objectives:

1. Go beyond the car

2. ‘Refuel’ our vehicles

3. Integrate, integrate, integrate

4. Make the poor the priority

5. Switch on to IT networks

6. Change people’s behaviour

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Food for thoughts

• From what perspective will we look at this: euro-centric vs.

international, global vs. local, urban vs. rural?

• How do we want future societies to look like?

• What happens to those places with less connection to the

global economy? Will we see a higher social segregation?

• What other ways of access to work, education, services, etc.

can we provide?

• How can we reduce the need for mobility?

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Food for thoughts

• How can we combine the long-lasting fight to reduce climate

change with necessary immediate solutions?

• With mobility being the connecting element, how do we ensure the

inclusion of less attractive regions? Is moving away the only

possibility?

• With emerging societies subsequently doing the same development

mistakes Western societies did (repeating patterns), is it maybe

time to tackle the ever present paradigm of growth?

• If mobility is an expression of communication and interaction, is it

necessary to change people’s behaviour to change mobility? Is that

even possible?

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Further research

• Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock

• Deutschlandfunk: Belohnung für Stauvermeider (example from Utrecht, NL where people receive reward for leaving their car at home)

• Ulrich protestiert - Leben ohne Auto (German report about why we rely on cars and how a life without would look like)

• Mobile Lives Forum: Preparing the mobility transition

• LSE Cities Urban Age

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Sources

1. BBC News Viewpoint: The future of mobility (by Michel Taride, President Hertz International)

2. The Guardian: Future vehicles need to be better connected and available to everyone (sponsored post)

3. The Guardian: Sustainable mobility calls for clear framework

4. The Guardian: Sylvain Haon on the future of mobility – video

5. The Guardian: Susan Claris on her vision of future transport planning

6. thisbigcity: 2025 – the Future of Mobility and our Cities

7. The Guardian - Germany's shrinking cities: a view from Salzgitter

8. Allianz Risk Pulse: The future of individual mobility (annotated version)

9. Artur D. Little: future lab - The Future of Urban Mobility (annotated version)

10. Castells, Manuel. "Space of flows, space of places: Materials for a theory of urbanism in the information age." Comparative planning cultures (2005): 45-63.; Wikipedia: Space of flows

11. Moriarty, Patrick, and Damon Honnery. "Low-mobility: The future of transport." Futures 40.10 (2008): 865-872.

12. Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften Acatech. Smart Cities: Deutsche Hochtechnologie FR Die Stadt Der Zukunft-Aufgaben Und Chancen. Springer, 2011.

13. Climate Focus: Bikes to reduce emission, May 2013

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Picture credits

1. https://flic.kr/p/gkzZSB

2. https://flic.kr/p/iHmsiK

3. https://flic.kr/p/fHpgjG

4. https://flic.kr/p/dbA8EN

5. https://flic.kr/p/fDA81V

6. https://flic.kr/p/fDA8xv

7. https://flic.kr/p/iXybNN

8. https://flic.kr/p/iHnE8y

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