Six ideas on the future of mobility

Mobile vision

Towards a vehicular urbanism (and beyond?)

Innovative Technologies like E-vehicles, active lifestyle apps and the sharing economy open up new promising vistas for a vehicular urbanism to mitigate the negative effects of the current vehicular urban mobility paradigm. Still the fundamental question is how these new challenges and technologies will impact the quality of place and life in tomorrow’s cities. In the nineteenth century the industrial revolution, urbanization and rise of (lower) middle class resulted in a massive influx of vehicular transport (both private carriages and public omnibuses and streetcars) in the urban streetscape formerly dominated by pedestrians. This led to the recreation of the street into an arena in which pedestrian, carriages, omnibuses and streetcars fought for their right of way.

New traffic surveys and rules to facilitate vehicular transport, instated by Eugene Henard, resulted in regulation of the arena by developing the concept of the roundabout to create safe crossings, instigating the traffic rules on the right of way coming from the right, and developed urban traffic policy based on empirical traffic surveys. All focussing on the flow, safety and efficiency of vehicular traffic at the cost of the pedestrians.

World Expos of 1939 and 1964, both in New York City, presented futuristic vistas of modern cities completely planned around car mobility, an ideal that has been heavily criticised in later decades. Still, in General Motors’ 2010 Futurama, GM presented a mobile vision that was surprisingly similar to the utopian urban ideals offered during the better part of the twentieth century.

GM’s vision doesn’t do much when it comes to local urban business.

Their vehicular urbanism solves only partly the downsides. GM’s vision does contribute to a healthier urban environment, but doesn’t do much when it comes to local urban business (introducing new global players like Uber, Snappcar, etc.) and certainly not when it comes to basic social constraints on in-active, un-healthy lifestyles and social estrangement. As long as vehicles and the associated separated infrastructure for it is dominating the urban mobility system, the public domain will be a transient space, ideal for vehicles at the cost of the human needs for the streets as a stage set for local social life and business.

The challenge is to embed technology into everyday life and the everyday living environment, building on the local space identity of the historical urban landscape. Picking up the other tradition of 19th and 20th century urban planning, reaching fromthe Park Movement through Jane Jacobs and William Whyte, to nowadays the Greenway Movement and Place Making Movement, transforming transient space in a public domain serving the full urban agenda.

Thanks to the Casseres Plan, the city of Eindhoven and the Brainport Region have a strong sense of place identity on which we can build, namely a fullgrown radial park system as well as historic radial arteries. In short, a strong tradition on co-creation of space, society and economy.

Prof. Pieter van Wesemael

Door to door

Future of the Vehicle, Future of the City

Rouillard lectures about the future of the vehicle and the city and stresses the importance of the door to door mobility service. The latter is the most important factor for the popularity of the car, you only need the car as mode of transport to complete a door to door trip, rather than the car as a mode of transport in itself. In the twentieth century the (combustion engine) car defined the city with its noise and emissions. However, the car is changing increasingly towards an ecological and connected mobility; the ECV (Electric Connected Vehicle). Therefore, the question arises what will happen with the city; with its public space and the architecture.

Not the distance, but the easiness of reaching a city becomes important.

This ECV is one of the trends that can be seen nowadays and influences urban territories. Other trends that can be seen is sharing, and the mobility is shifting from proximity to accessibility. So, not the distance, but the easiness of reaching a city becomes important. These last two trends can also be seen in the ECV when Rouillard explained a little bit more about the ECV. First of all, a big difference from mass transport is that the ECV is not replacing a transport system, but adds another transport system. Besides, they are noiseless, clean, light, communicating, shareable, and they will be autonomous very soon. Furthermore, they can have one, two, three or four wheels and go slowly. The electric bike is therefore also an ECV. When the speed of a vehicle changes, things in urban space will also change. For example, this can be seen with the Zagato Volpe; a slow, small electric car that can use the elevator to bring you to the office. This vehicle has the same service as a regular car, but the architecture of the city can change drastically. A slow speed is a quality of architecture, so when different speed zones are created, the advantage of a regular car is gone and the shape of the city changes.

Prof. Dominique Rouillard

Smart mobility and spatial effects

Stemerding investigates four scenarios, all of which are based on current trends in Dutch cities. These trends include the increasing use of the speed pedelec, the emergence of connected and autonomous vehicles and mobility as a service (MaaS).

The first scenario presupposes the speed pedelec as the dominant commuter modality for trips up to 25km. The effects are major savings in (car) parking space but requires investments in adequate bicycle parking. The current bike infrastructure poses a challenge, the differences in speed between different bike types means that a separate infrastructure for the speed pedelec is necessary.

The second scenario involves the widespread use of privately owned connected and autonomous vehicles. These vehicles can park themselves in which case parking spaces within the city are no longer required. In turn this does mean an increase in traffic volume as both occupied and unoccupied vehicles move from the centre of the city to the outskirts.

In the third scenario, MaaS has replaced car ownership. The mobility service is provided by a combination of public transport, shared cars and shared bicycles. A hierarchical structure is envisioned in which the transferral between modes of transport is facilitated by multifunctional hubs. The road capacity needed is reduced and parking spaces are concentrated mainly around the hubs.

Finally a fourth scenario combines the three trends mentioned above. This scenario divides the city in traffic zones. A car free centre with, around it, high density areas with shared space traffic and low density areas with separated mobility flows. The areas are enclosed by a ring road of high speed traffic, connecting the many park and ride transfers.

Drs. Marc Stemerding

Future mobility, planning with uncertainty

Nabielek researches how to plan for the future regarding increasing uncertainty on future mobility. To do so, Nabielek proposes four scenarios. The origin of the scenarios lies in the so called ‘two-factor/four-quadrant futures. Two topics, international versus national and public versus private, divide four possibilities. From these possibilities societies can be imagined and the attitudes of these societies towards certain topics is envisioned. The topics include governance (to what extend are the European Union, the country, the city/region, economic market or the society itself responsible for the governance in a scenario), sustainability and culture and technology. The topics describe realistic scenarios and can be used to give relevant predictions to plan for the future.

The first scenario is Market Place (Beursplein). In this scenario big differences between the success and possibilities of people exist. As a result, there will be a contrast between rural areas and strong cities. It is based on the idea that people who can afford it have private cars. The second scenario contains local neighbourhoods/strong communities (Eigenwijk) in which ambitions in sustainability and economy are achieved by people living in connected neighbourhoods in which everything is shared. Scenario three is top down sustainability (Ecocratië). There will be a strong national government and the citizens have to think carefully about what form of mobility they will use. The last scenario is living in a bubble/parallel worlds (Bubbelstad). There will be two types of bubbles; a smart and fast bubble, and a slower bubble. The differences between these bubbles are big. With these scenarios Kersten Nabielek shows that towards the future the question should arise if the government should plan actively or if there should be a framework in which local communities and companies can work.

drs. Kersten Nabielek

The future of mobility, disruption in action

Van de Weijer explores numerous solutions to the mobility and infrastructure problems faced due to the exponential growth in mobility. The problems that arise are pollution, fossil fuel dependency congestion, casualties and the large claim mobility lays on public space (in cities).

Many experts believe autonomous electric vehicles to be the solution to this problem. In controlled environments the autonomous vehicle works, however, in the urban environment traffic is chaotic and often functions outside rules and regulation. Autonomous vehicles should obey rules at all times, posing a problem in urban situations. For the urban environment a future without cars is perhaps more conceivable. Research has shown that younger generations are less interested in cars and although the car is preferred as a mode of transportation when compared to public transport, it loses in popularity when compared to the bike.

Despite this, the car still is a popular means of transportation. The technological developments mean that cars are increasingly safe and with the rise of electric powered vehicles increasingly cheap to drive. The latter drives the trend of leasing cars rather than owning them which started a few decades ago, paying for usage rather than ownership. For public transport this means that it still is a secondary mode of transport, often pushed by the (local) government, even though the costs of public transport per passenger per kilometre are much higher for the government than the costs of bike usage. Cars actually raise money for the government.

Bikes will become the leading (economic) sustainable solution for urbanized areas.

In conclusion, the prognosis for the car is that road transport will become increasingly important due to cleaner and safer vehicles and the demonetization of transport. Bikes will become the leading (economic) sustainable solution for urbanized areas and urban mass transit will exist mainly as autonomous bus lines between urbanized areas. The train is too restricted by its rails to continue to compete with the bus and cars. Further trends are that autonomous technology is used mainly for economic and comfort reasons, however, there is no near future for driverless vehicles. The transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles occurs more rapidly mainly due to economic incentive. Car ownership changes increasingly towards private lease and car sharing is on the rise as well. Future business models will be based on data gathering through the interconnectivity of cars.

Dr. Carlo van de Weijer

New generation of travel demand forecasting models

Dr Rasouli presents and explains Simurgh, an information based travel demand forecasting system. Due to the rise of the smart city and the increasing dependency of ICT, current travel demand forecasting systems are no longer able to make accurate prognoses. The activities which old systems base their models on are often out-dated and new, less defined activities have arisen within the smart city. Together with the TU/e, Rasouli is developing a new system called Simurgh. This model takes into account virtual activities like teleworking and teleshopping, multitasking (working whilst traveling), new mobility options, changing attitudes towards new technologies, subscriptions on shared mobility, MaaS, and other apps. All these trends influence travel demand and can often be researched by data gathering. In its forecasts Simurgh takes into account the information that is being used and the sources of the information in order to establish its accuracy.

Dr. Soora Rasouli