Real-life policy challenge
Six city pilots with real-life policy challenges faced as a result of urban mobility transition in both passenger & freight, covering urban and peri-urban areas, different emerging mobility solutions, and context requirements.
The six pilot cities (Valencia, Padua, Kalisz, Budapest, Tel Aviv, and Ningbo) will be testing different urban mobility solutions. SPROUT’s work starts by creating an understanding of the current state of urban mobility and identifying the drivers of future change. From this, city-specific scenarios will be created and examined for their impacts on sustainability and on policy requirements. The cities will look at likely impacts and operational feasibility, identify areas where policy interventions, such as revised regulations, will be needed and what policy response alternatives there are, and then test and validate the pilot solutions and assess their financial, environmental and social impacts.
SPROUT takes a data-driven approach: discovering what data is available in each city, and how (if) it is being used to create performance indicators and formulate policies, is a crucial challenge. It is already evident that the type and quantity of data available in the different cities varies greatly, with common gaps in freight data.
The pilot solutions cover a broad spectrum and vary greatly in their focus. Among them:
- intermodal hubs within the city boundaries bringing together passenger and freight traffic, both public and private;
- self-driving pods for ‘cargo-hitching’, giving passenger transport an additional freight-carrying capacity;
- Internet of Things used for the planning, booking and dynamic management of parking and load/unload operations;
- Shared mobility, through dockless bike-sharing and car-sharing systems;
- data-driven planning and traffic management strategies to prioritise non-motorised transport modes and vulnerable road users;
- solutions to problems around very short-range or hyper-local freight transport.