We’ve now analysed mobility from a number of perspectives. We’ve applied complicated economic models to mobility, psychoanalysed user choices (though sometimes a train is just a train), taken the influence of social media and other ICTs into account, and also considered the role of geography, language, culture and borders.
Great, we’ve got our guidelines! Let’s pack up and go home.
“Beta-testing is probably the most interesting tactic for the New Mobility: A first group of dedicated users will provide you with necessary feedback to optimize your service, and they will end up being your best ambassadors.”
– Maarten Kooiman
Oh, so there’s more?
Preparing for the workshops
Sometimes a train is just a train. Photo: Thisisbossi
After the first step, in which we integrated the various schools of thought, emphasizing the practical implications of each approach, we prepared for the expert workshops, a review of directions in mobility research as well as policy and product/service development, identifying clear cross-modal aspects to future mobility that impact people’s mobility attitudes and decisions. This review looked closely at four important challenges:
- Automated mobility;
- Seamless mobility;
- Virtual mobility;
- Inclusive mobility.
Initially, there was a small number of user consultations in four countries (Italy, Israel, Spain and the Netherlands), to provide intelligence for the expert workshops. Focus groups were used to test out parts of the MIND-SETS concept. The focus groups were grouped by location, to represent diverse social groups and the vulnerable/mobility-challenged as well as to ensure gender balance.
The workshops
The next step was to set up the expert workshops on the four key future mobility challenges, policies, products and services. The basic criteria for selection was experience/multidisciplinary background, geographical coverage and gender. Each workshop conducted a preliminary two-phase DELPHI survey online, in order to highlight discrepancies to be discussed at the workshops and to produce preparatory material for the event. The conclusions were disseminated among the selected experts, to enable them to include their reflections in the final reporting. The four workshops took place in parallel in Barcelona in October 2015.
Urban transport challenges. Photo: Joiseyshowaa
Conclusions
The outputs of these workshops were consolidated into the draft version of the MIND-SETS decision-support guidelines, which were further refined in the latter stages of the project to become insights. With regard to current transport planning and policy decision-making tools, this new MIND-SETS understanding challenges traditional decision-making frameworks.
We focused on two specific areas in the planning and policy area:
- Challenges for state-of-the-practice transport models at the urban and continental scale (e.g. conventional four-step models, activity-based models) and the opportunities linked to new paradigms (e.g. massive micro-simulation, complex systems);
- Challenges for state-of-the-practice cost-benefit assessments, based on welfare economic theory in relation to how the value of time or risk of accidents are measured as social and environmental externalities.
In short, the testing phase looked at how current thinking and decision practices need to change and produced some interesting insights on future mobility trends.
This testing was used to refine and validate the MIND-SETS approach and to analyse future mobility trends such as car sharing and automated mobility. In addition, a summary of the results of the workshops is available, as are the full reports on future mobility challenges and on future trends.