New urban mobility options: Alternative futures and their impact in transport planning techniques

Abstract

The acceleration of technology evolution is changing urban mobility at a much faster pace than we have seen in previous decades, leading to an increasingly uncertain future within this field. It is very likely that current transport planning tools and techniques will have to be adapted to the increasing number of innovative mobility forms in order to maintain their usefulness in the urban policy cycle. In this paper, we present a series of explorative scenarios for European urban mobility and the consequent challenges that they imply for such tools and techniques. Two groups of scenarios have been developed for assessing two different uncertain relations. First, a set of exogeneous scenarios has been defined for studying how different urban mobility socioeconomic contexts could affect the evolution of emerging mobility solutions. These scenarios are adaptations of the IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Second, a set of pathways that these mobility innovations may follow has been shaped in order to determine to what extent each innovation will potentially pose new requirements on transport data sources, models and decision support tools. The methodology used for developing the scenarios started by a literature review covering the most prominent urban mobility trends. Then, policy-makers and modellers were engaged in the process through a series of workshops and a Delphi poll. This served to gather inputs from a wide range of end-users and practitioners. The paper covers the results from these methodologies, unveils the resultant scenarios, and outlines the conclusions in terms of future plausible requirements for transport planning tools and techniques.