Urban mobility refers to the movement of people within cities, from daily commutes for work or pleasure to touristic excursions.
Sustainable urban mobility is essential for both economic development and quality of life in cities, and involves taking measures such as encouraging the use of low-carbon, renewable fuels while simultaneously improving public transport systems.
Mobility as a Service (MaaS)
MaaS brings together public transportation with commercial travel options like ridesourcing, car sharing, taxis and bike sharing into one mobility service. Citizens can select an itinerary that best meets their objectives for each journey – such as saving time or money while reducing carbon emissions or improving accessibility.
MaaS offers users different levels of integration, from searching and booking (level 1) or planning and paying (level 2) their entire journey. Stated preference (SP) studies and real world trials have demonstrated that early MaaS adopters tend to exhibit multimodal behavior, are concerned with environmental sustainability and maintain healthy commute lifestyles; but don’t view car ownership as paramount.
Businesses also reap the advantages of MaaS by recruiting and retaining talent through lower commute costs, reduced carbon footprint, and making cities more liveable for all.
Multimodal transport
Integrated multimodal transportation systems offer travelers flexible and eco-friendly alternatives to personal cars. These networks link public transit, bike sharing, car sharing, e-scooters, ride hailing zones and other on-demand services into an interconnected system that makes city travel faster, cheaper and more sustainable.
Buses are the preferred public transportation mode worldwide with 180 billion passengers riding them each year, followed by metro, trams, and commuter rail services. More and more commuters opt for public transit when traveling longer distances as it allows them to switch modes throughout their journey.
This transition towards multimodality poses considerable challenges to urban mobility planners and policies, with shared services having the potential to erode public transport’s market share while displace first and last mile travel previously performed by active modes (Veeneman 2019; Tirachini 2020). To address these potential concerns, multimodality must be carefully considered during planning processes with decarbonization and sustainability goals as societal goals in mind; holistic city planning will enable this while increasing accessibility and supporting economic activity.
Commuters’ journeys
As urban populations around the globe expand, sustainable mobility has become a primary issue. Not only does it play a critical role in supporting individual and community activities but it is also at the core of regional and global economic development and essential for meeting human needs.
This report presents interviews that illustrate how commuters’ daily lives are dictated by their travel choices, often being subject to uncertainty, ambiguity and a lack of alternatives. Daily life’s complexity manifests in different people making decisions regarding travel decisions for varying reasons and motivations.
Although household trips to work and school have decreased across most 109 metro areas between 2019-2022, aggregate metrics fail to reveal the true nature of structural shifts occurring within households. Households have switched out longer commutes for shorter tours that begin and end near home that account for a much greater share of personal miles traveled (See Figure 2). These changes can be observed using an ethnographic approach for data analysis as well as various qualitative social research methodologies (See Figure 3).
Mobility Analytics
New mobility solutions expand the offerings available in cities, but can only do so efficiently within an appropriate framework. Analytic tools are an indispensable resource in this regard.
Finding urban mobility patterns provides valuable insight for urban planning, transport science and geography. In particular, tracking origin-destination (OD) travel demand patterns reveals when and where transport networks are stressed – thus providing effective measures that can be taken to ease congestion.
Our tools combine state-of-the-art extreme data mining, aggregation and analytics technologies with domain expertise in urban mobility and transportation to unlock important capabilities for city councils, transport operators and citizens alike. They offer advanced methods that support visual analysis of spatial-temporal mobility data while safeguarding citizens’ privacy – such as utilising data locality to perform sensitive analytics tasks without leaving their source data repository – while using novel spatiotemporal compression techniques specifically tailored for spatial-temporal data sets.