Overview
The annual growth of personal mobility results in increasing safety, economic and environmental concerns.SUNSET will develop and evaluate a set of services that use social networks and incentives to encourage people to travel more sustainably in urban environments.
The objective of SUNSET is to facilitate sustainable urban mobility in the EU through services that build on the latest ICT and 'Web 2.0' technologies. SUNSET focuses on services that:
- Reduce congestion: services that help reducing traffic jams and average travelling times. Our objective is to reduce rush hour traffic by 5% (measured in car kilometres in a specific area)
- Increase safety: services that allow travellers to optimise their route, for instance by motivating drivers to avoid roads with many cyclists or by allowing people travelling by train to avoid waiting times on dark and silent railway stations
- Protect the environment: services that reduce the impact of mobility on the environment, for instance in terms of reduced CO2 emissions, improved air quality management, and reduced noise pollution
- Increase personal wellbeing: services that allow citizens to set and monitor personal objectives: like increased individual safety, reduced travel times, reduced costs, improved comfort, and increased health
SUNSET alleviates the concerns regarding the externalities of increasing mobility, by taking a new approach to urban mobility management using the latest ICT technologies. It is about cooperation by information sharing and provision of positive incentives between travellers, road authorities and other parties. The information is targeted on individual travel behaviour, and thus allows road authorities to fine-tune their transport policies and individuals to meet their personal objectives. The personalized approach can also help to alleviate other societal problems as social safety, social exclusion and even personal health.
SUNSET has four types of stakeholders: the local government, individuals, communities (e.g. company employees) and 3rd party service providers. SUNSET combines personalized services, incentives, and social networks to help people to adopt more sustainable ways of travel:
- Personalized: SUNSET services coach travellers and provide them with rewards and incentives for good (sustainable) travel behaviour. This allows cities to manage their city-wide sustainability goals (“system goals”) by influencing the travel behaviour of their citizens at the personal level, creating a balance between system-level and personal mobility goals.
- Social: SUNSET services integrate with social networks such as Twitter, allowing travellers to easily access the SUNSET services. Another advantage is that travellers can use the SUNSET services to exchange information amongst each other (“wisdom of the crowds”), such as travel patterns and information from sensors on mobile phones and in the infrastructure. The combination of SUNSET services and social networks facilitates the build up of travel-related communities and allows cities to easily reach large groups of citizens.
The SUNSET services will be evaluated in two living labs, one in Enschede (NL) and one in Göteborg (SE) or Leeds (UK). The goal of the living labs is to assess how the SUNSET services contribute to the project objectives.