We need disruptive innovation to make urban movement greener

Urban mobility significantly contributes to climate change, and while efforts by planning and academic communities focus on efficiency improvements, University of Melbourne researchers argue that mere incremental efforts are insufficient to achieve climate neutrality.

Professor Stephan Winter and Associate Professor Martin Tomko, from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology’s Department of Infrastructure Engineering, have published a vision paper in the Association for Computing Machinery ‘Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems’ journal. The paper was co-authored with Professor Monika Sester, Leibniz University, Hannover (Germany) and Dr Alexandra Millonig, Austrian Institute of Technology.

This international team of researchers now calls for the computational transport science communities to genuinely prioritise climate action in their research and seek deeper understanding of interventions for greener urban mobility in order to truly improve transportation systems and reduce environmental impact.

The complexity of urban mobility

People move around cities for various reasons, including work, school and leisure. Urban transport greatly contributes to CO2 emissions, air pollution, noise and land use. Urban mobility - the movement of people in cities via cars, buses, bikes and other modes - results in a complex system where travel behaviours impact on urban planning, transport engineering and traffic management, which, in turn, feedback and influence movement through cities.

While present efforts in urban analytics aim to mitigate the impacts of urban mobility on climate through technological interventions, the researchers argue that incremental improvements to existing, unsustainable systems will not achieve the climate neutrality target of 2050 set by the Paris Agreement.

Data analytics are necessary to understand urban mobility as a complex system and to inform and optimise urban planning and transport management, thus improving the use of diverse transport modes and supporting user satisfaction.

A systems thinking approach

Importantly, partial improvements to individual components of the system cannot achieve climate-neutral urban mobility. A holistic approach is necessary, because an improvement in one sector or characteristic of the transport system may lead to unintended consequences in another. For example, building new roads to relieve congestion may seem effective, but it often leads to increased demand and even more traffic. Similarly, electric vehicles are often considered net-zero, but their production generates considerable carbon emissions, which inadvertently negate the intended environmental benefits.

“We need to consider urban mobility as a cohesive system with interconnected causes and effects, rather than isolated subsystems,” Associate Professor Tomko said.

The researchers emphasise the need for systems thinking, which involves understanding feedback loops within urban systems and conducting life-cycle assessments of carbon emissions.

“This approach ensures that urban mobility systems serve people’s needs equitably while minimising environmental impact,” Professor Winter said.

“We need a data analysis agenda that places climate action at the forefront of urban mobility research.”

The team calls on the computational transportation science community to:

• Collaborate across disciplines: Collaborate across disciplines to tackle the wicked challenges posed by mobility, involving infrastructure engineers, transport planners, behavioural scientists and economists to achieve a holistic approach. Develop shared data sets and collaborative simulation tools for urban mobility systems engineering to assess innovative ideas.
• Be climate conscious and tackle significant issues: Focus on research that has a substantial impact on climate change, even if it involves addressing the complexities of urban systems.

• Be transparent and address unintended consequences: Focus on understanding and mitigating the unintended consequences of technological developments in urban mobility. Be honest and explicit about how individual research contributions affect the climate.

Read more here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649312