Innovative Bike-Sharing Design as a Research and Educational Platform for Promoting More Livable Urban Futures

Studying the viability of innovative urban access design is the key in achieving optimum results when attempting to transform dogmatism referring to conventional car-orientation into a meaningful driver of modal change founded on the actual societal needs for future transportation. An efficient public bicycle scheme could be the very definition of a system that could encourage and even facilitate, in real terms, such a transition. This paper is discussing how a post-graduate course embraced, through the means of a service-oriented design exercise, the potential introduction of such a system. More specifically, seven research teams, closely guided by the three authors, were affiliated with designing a new hypothetical bike-sharing scheme in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden more captivating than the existing one. The paper reports on: a) the novel educational approach the tutors employed, b) the taught experiences that helped the students utilize their potential as learners but also as inventive designers, c) the research in terms of design results and d) the overall transition from solely serving the needs of automotive mobility in urban environments, to creating a knowledge platform that actually illustrates an improved design-innovation process to tackle future urban demands and eventually have a real-life context impact on the city of Gothenburg

Motion Hub, the implementation of an integrated end-to-end journey planner

© AET 2018 and contributorsThe term “eMobility” and been brought into use partly to encourage use of electric vehicles but more especially to focus on the transformation from electric vehicles as products to electrified personal transport as a service. Under the wider umbrella of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) this has accompanied the growth of car clubs in general. The Motion Hub project has taken this concept a step further to include not just the car journey but the end-to-end journey. The booking of multifaceted journeys is well established in the leisure and business travel industries, where flights, car hire and hotels are regularly booked with a single transaction on a website. To complete an end-to-end scenario Motion Hub provides integration of public transport with electric vehicle and electric bike use. Building on a previous InnovateUK funded project that reviewed the feasibility of an integrated journey management system, the Motion Hub project has brought together a Car Club, a University, and EV infrastructure company, a bicycle hire company with electric bicycle capabilities and a municipality to implement a scheme and test it on the ground. At the heart of the project has been the development of a website that integrates the public transport booking with the hire of electric vehicles or bicycles. Taking the implementation to a fully working system accessible to members of the public presents a number of significant challenges. This paper identifies those challenges, details the progress and success of the Motion Hub and sets out the lessons learnt about end-to-end travel. The project was fortunate to have as its municipal partner the Council of a sizeable South East England town, Southend-on-Sea. With a population of 174,800 residents with good road, rail and air links there is considerable traffic in and out of the town. The Council has already shown its commitment to sustainable transport. In the previous six years it had installed a number of electric vehicle charging points for use by the public and latterly had trialled car club activity. An early challenge in the project was the location of physical infrastructure in an already crowded municipal space in order to provide the local ‘spokes’ of the system. In addition to its existing charging points, Southend now has four locations where electric cars can be hired, five where electric bikes are available and the local resources to maintain these assets. Combining a number of web-based services and amalgamating their financial transactions is relatively straightforward. However, introducing the potential for public transport ticketing as well raises additional security, scale and financial constraints. The project has engaged with major players and regulators across the public transport industry.Peer reviewe

Promoting Intermodal Connectivity at California’s High Speed Rail Stations

High-speed rail (HSR) has emerged as one of the most revolutionary and transformative transportation technologies, having a profound impact on urban-regional accessibility and inter-city travel across Europe, Japan, and more recently China and other Asian countries. One of HSR’s biggest advantages over air travel is that it offers passengers a one-seat ride into the center of major cities, eliminating time-consuming airport transfers and wait times, and providing ample opportunities for intermodal transfers at these locales. Thus, HSR passengers are typically able to arrive at stations that are only a short walk away from central business districts and major tourist attractions, without experiencing any of the stress that car drivers often experience in negotiating such highly congested environments. Such an approach requires a high level of coordination and planning of the infrastructural and spatial aspects of the HSR service, and a high degree of intermodal connectivity. But what key elements can help the US high-speed rail system blend successfully with other existing rail and transit services? That question is critically important now that high-speed rail is under construction in California. The study seeks to understand the requirements for high levels of connectivity and spatial and operational integration of HSR stations and offer recommendations for seamless, and convenient integrated service in California intercity rail/HSR stations. The study draws data from a review of the literature on the connectivity, intermodality, and spatial and operational integration of transit systems; a survey of 26 high-speed rail experts from six different European countries; and an in-depth look of the German and Spanish HSR systems and some of their stations, which are deemed as exemplary models of station connectivity. The study offers recommendations on how to enhance both the spatial and the operational connectivity of high-speed rail systems giving emphasis on four spatial zones: the station, the station neighborhood, the municipality at large, and the region

GOOD_GO: An Open-Source Platform to Incentive Urban Sustainable Mobility

Good_Go is the first complete platform to incentive urban sustainable mobility. It contains different modules to incentive use of sustainable mobility like foot, bike, bus or innovative sharing solutions (car-pooling, car-sharing, bike-sharing and others). A first module of the platform is linked to a bike-theft disincentive system with the innovative Bluetooth OBU (On-Board-Unit) called BlueBI able to send an acoustic alarm in case of theft and allowing a participative finding of stolen bikes. A second module is linked to a rewarding platform while a third module allow to organize Mobility Management measures or sustainable mobility competition at different scale level (whole city, institutional system like hospital, university or single company/school)

modelling the combined use of bicycles and train in Lisbon, Portugal

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020 UIDB/03127/2020Many capital cities are expanding bicycle lanes or investing in public bike-sharing systems to make cycling mobility a viable transport solution within urban areas. While bicycles are fit for short-distance trips (publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Data enabling digital ecosystem for sustainable shared electric mobility-as-a-service in smart cities-an innovative business model perspective

Increase in urbanization drives the need for municipalities to make mobility more efficient, both to address climate goals as well as creating a smart living environment for citizens, with less noise congestion, and pollution. As vehicles are being electrified, further advances will be needed to meet social, environmental, and economic sustainability targets, and a more efficient use of vehicles and public transport is central in this endeavor. Accordingly, Electric Mobility as a Service (eMaaS) has developed as a concept with the potential to increase sustainability mobility in cities and been designated as a phenomenon with potential to radically change how people move in the future. But presently there is the lack of a common business model that supports complex integration of all actors, digital technologies, and infrastructures involved in the eMaaS business ecosystem. This study aims to support the further development of eMaaS by providing a state of the art of eMaaS and further proposes a digital ecosystem as a business model for eMaaS sharing in smart cities. Accordingly, a systematic literature review was adopted grounded on secondary data from the literature to offers a new approach to urban mobility and demonstrate the suitability of the eMaaS concept in smart communities. The digital ecosystem is designed based on system design approach. Findings from this study provides a sustainable policy perspective, discusses the challenges and opportunities towards the development of eMaaS and its impact on electrification of vehicles. Overall, findings from this study considers the role of electric vehicles as part of the mobility sharing economy. Recommendations from this study provides designs and strategies for eMaaS, the interrelations between eMobility and other everyday practices, strategically highlighting the positive benefits of eMaaS and broader policies to limit private car usage in cities.publishedVersio

Improving Sustainable Mobility through Modal Rewarding: The GOOD_GO Smart Platform

Private car mobility registers today a h igh accident rate and around 70% of the overall CO2 emissions from transport were generated by road mode split (European Commission, 2016). Moreover, in urban areas they occur 38% of the overall fatalities from road transport, and 23% of the overall CO2 emissions (European Commission, 2013). As a result, a modal shift of at least a part of passenger transport in urban areas, from private car to sustainable transport systems is desirable. This research aims to promote sustainable mobility through two mutually reinforcing "main actions": firstly, there is a r ewarding Open-Source platform, named as GOOD_GO; secondly, there is the SW/HW system connecting to the wide world of private and/or shared bicycles. Through the GOOD_GO platform Web portal and App, a user enters a so called 'social rewarding game' thought to incentive sustainable mobility habits, and gets access to the second item consisting of a system to disincentive bike-theft and based on the passive RFID technology. The low-cost deterrent bike-theft and bike monitoring/tracking system is functional to bring a big number of citizens inside the rewarding game. In 2018, a pilot test has implemented in the city of Livorno (Tuscany, It), and it involved around 1,000 citizens. Results were quite encouraging and today, the cities of Livorno, Pisa and Bolzano will enlarge the incentive system both to home-to-school and home-to-work mobility. The Good_Go platform is an actual M-a-a-S (Mobility-as-a-Service) application, and it becoming a Mobility Management decision system support, jointly with the opportunity of organizing more incentive tenders and rewarding systems types