Overview
Cities are growing, forms of life and work are changing, people are mobile and interconnected – the urban population is constantly moving.
At the same time, public transport in cities is being transformed: new systems of bicycle rental and carsharing are evolving and services offered by public transport providers are increasingly integrated.
Ticket purchasing and accessing timetables and the latest traffic reports are being simplified by the growing use of smartphones. These developments facilitate the flexible combination of different transport modes in cities to cover distance. This combination is known as intermodality.
Researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) are considering whether and to what extent intermodality is key to a more efficient urban transport system. These issues are analyzed within the Urban Mobility Project.
The objectives of the Urban Mobility Project are:
- to describe the intermodal transport system, the intermodal user as well as the connection between intermodal mobility behavior and spatial structures.
- to show how these connections can be shown with models.
- to show the effect on transport demand and choice of location to live.
The methodical cores of the project are quantitative and qualitative analyzes to intermodal mobility in Berlin and Hamburg. International cities serve as references. These empirical findings will be incorporated into existing models developed by the DLR for simulating traffic demand, traffic flow, and the choice of a living location. The research results shall be discussed by experts such as urban and traffic planners, associations and transportation providers. Together with the researchers, there will be potentials and solution proposals but also possible obstacles identified.
The transdisciplinary and application-related research approach is decisive for the project. In that way, one can find out where and how far intermodal mobility is practiced and how future concepts can look like. As a result, an analysis follows. This discusses how the transport system is influenced by a change of infrastructure and what the consequences for traffic and urban planners are.