New Integrated Smart Mobility Options

At the moment, there are numerous mobility concepts being developed and transport pilots being implemented in Northwest European cities and regions. Pilots on electric mobility, car-to-car communication, mobility management, smartphone apps on public transport services and city logistics to name only a few of them.

Public and private organizations and especially the EU commission spend billions of Euros in the current funding programmes (2007-2013) for the testing of innovative approaches. This has its origin in the urban growth that cities worldwide are experiencing: More and more people are moving to the cities which results in a higher demand for transport, whilst at the same time emissions need to be reduced to enable a certain living quality in high populated urban areas. The need for alternative transport modes and changing infrastructure is great.

The partners, mainly from transport and planning authorities, have experienced problems in assessing how well current projects or concepts are working out on long-term. Still, the partnership believes that there are at least five key elements that are important for the development of well-functioning mobility concepts:

• Environmental quality.
• Economy.
• Customer satisfaction.
• Mobility.
• Safety.

But what the partners also experience in their everyday work is that mobility pilots usually only focus on one or two of these key elements. This causes problems in the overall traffic network in their region. Therefore, we want to develop a tool kit as an evaluation methodology that will encompass all 5 of these criteria to ensure the most sustainable way of planning. The tool kit will help assess new concepts from the beginning on and during their duration for both planners and funders.