In Budapest, one of the main goal is to develop better modal shift opportunities between public transport and shared mobility services. In the recent years, BKK has developed a system for setting up mobility access points based on international examples. The purpose of designing these sites is to make shared services reliably available in a concentrated area.
In the SPROUT project, Budapest will develop 86 Mobility Points in the downtown area. With this number of locations, at least one Mobility Point can be reached within a maximum of 1 minute walk from any point in the targeted area. Thus, the advantage of the free-floating model of shared micromobility services can be maintained and the disorder of public land use can be improved.
Before the implementation of the Mobility Point, the BKK Centre for Budapest Transport together with a local transport modelling company, the RelativeGAP, developed a new traffic modelling procedure to analyse the expected effects of the Mobility Points. The base model was the Unified Transport Model of Budapest which is a macroscopic transport model for all mobility modes.
The suitability of macro-level traffic models are limited for mapping and examining short-distanced and decentralized travel needs due to their resolution. This recognition provided support to develop a procedure that can represent travel needs in a decentralized manner. It was important that the new procedure fits into the models built in the widely used PTV Visum software and that existing models should not be modified for micromobility studies. It was expected that the needs could be mapped between any number of network nodes, and that the procedure could be parameterized and the needs distributed in a user-friendly way.