Overview
The development of transport demand in cities is influenced by many factors, such as demographics, lifestyle changes and patterns of land-use. To satisfy demand, while coping with congestion, a variety of new mobility services may emerge, such as collective-transport on-request. The challenge for policy-makers is to set the conditions for innovation, while ensuring appropriate regulation of these services.
EUROMOS aimed to produce scenarios of mobility conditions in European cities for the year 2010, identify promising new mobility services and evaluate their impact on policy.
Funding
Results
Forecasts were made based on three scenarios, characterised as:
- continuation of current trends;
- a widening of the spread of household incomes;
- the application of traffic demand management policies.
Their impacts on the cities of Barcelona, Bordeaux, Gothenburg, Munich, Southampton and Turin, and the success of new mobility services, were shown to correlate strongly with local factors. Such factors included, political tradition, social attitudes, city morphology and size, and the regional economic activities.
The potential for 16 mobility services were identified, concerning:
- private needs, (transporting children to and from school);
- demand management, (the sale of capacity on private road infrastructure);
- car leasing and sharing arrangements.
Across all scenarios and cities, the restriction of individual motorised transport in the central business district emerged as a general strategy, combined with measures to support other modes. Strong traffic demand management, boosted the development of all mobility services relative to the other two scenarios.
New technologies were seen as critical to ensure the adequacy of new services, these should provide user information, control vehicle operations, and make payment easy. Unwillingness to share data between organisations was identified as a potential barrier.
Policy implications
The new mobility services provide new forms of public transport. These services will need regulation and may merit public funding. Policy-makers will need to look at the conditions for competition between traditional public transport, these new intermediate services, and private taxis.
Innovative freight services are seen as a contribution to economic competitiveness, while improving the attractiveness of central city areas. In general, this is thought to require public/private partnerships. Public authorities have an important role in setting up institutional arrangements, monitoring the schemes and providing financial support to overcome initial market barriers.
Regional planning may be needed to inhibit the dispersion of homes and businesses to areas outside the zone of traffic management controls. Otherwise, the conditions for financial and economic use of collective-transport by people and goods, moving in and out of the city, may not be met.