Tag Archive for: SMARTCities

Clubhouse Talk SMART Mobility #13: How London is shaping Future Mobility

The thirteenth talk in the clubhouse series “SmartMobility” took place on Thursday, June 10th, 2021, in which we (lecturers, participants, and partners from our CAS program “Smart Mobility Management driven by Smart Cities & Smart Data”) discussed current issues in the mobility industry and answer questions from our listeners.

The central question of this thirteenth talk was:

“How is London shaping future mobility?”

with …

➡️ Catrin Braun | SMART City Expert | Deutsche Telekom

➡️ Dr. Philipp Rode | London School of Economics/Executive Director LSE Cities | Lecturer at CAS «Smart Mobility Management«

➡️ Lukas Neckermann | COO Splyt | Lecturer at CAS «Smart Mobility Management«

BRAINFood:

▶️ How has your personal mobility behavior changed since you’ve been in London? In London, like in many cities, it is incredibly expensive to utilize an automobile as the main form of transportation. While there are still some times in which driving can be enjoyable, utilizing it as a main form of transportation while living in a city makes little financial sense when compared to the other options offered such as public transport and ride sharing.

▶️ What was the initial moment in which London started to think about shaping the future of mobility?
One of the most significant landmark events that started the discussion around the future of mobility in London was the release of the report “Traffic in Towns,” in which Sir Colin Buchanan outlined the potential damages caused by a reliance on the motor car by transportation, one of which being the disruption of the overall city structure of London. Another would be the discussion around clean air, a concern that continues to be one of the top priorities for people living in London and something that London has tried to alleviate through means such as congestion charge zones.

▶️ Which kinds of concepts for Start-ups work in London?
There is a large innovation culture in London that relies heavily on the freedom of data in terms of land transportation that is offered through organizations such as Transport for London. Apps such as Citymapper rely on this data to ensure that users can get from point A to point B as easily as possible.

▶️ Is there anything that doesn’t work in London that other cities can learn from?
One peculiarity about London that makes experimentation and implementation of different progressive mobility ideas is the lack of consistency and agreement between the different people and boroughs within London. For example, if one would like to drive a rentable electric scooter in one borough, they may not be able to drive it within another. This lack of agreement leads to many failed projects and experimentation such as spreading congestion charging, pop-up bike lanes, and low traffic neighborhoods.

▶️ If you were the mayor of London, what would you change and how? One aspect is London’s role as a leader for innovation for mega cities. London could fulfill this role by following through with more progressive initiatives such as low-traffic neighborhoods, low emission zones, and implementing more pedestrian zones such as superblocks. Another aspect would be focusing on the funding of the future of mobility, especially with respect to the effects of a change from gas-powered to electric-powered mobility. 

“What will mobility in London look like in 2035?”

“Fewer lanes for automobiles, more electric buses, more autonomous mobility, and more integration of apps” (Lukas Neckermann)

“Calmer, slower and better flowing” (Dr. Philipp Rode)

” …. and greener and more sustainable” (Catrin Braun)

London provides an excellent example of not only what cities are currently doing to progress mobility, but also of what mobility in cities will look like in the future. Through the many methods of …
– reducing the reliance on automobiles,
– integrating accessible mobility, and
– implementing more sustainable means of transportation,
The areas that are currently taken up by automobile lanes can be turned into public spaces, allowing for a revitalization of many areas within the city. This idea of revitalization is one that we can expect from cities all around the world.

 

 

Zukunftsforum 2018: Designing Digital Cities

On May 16, 2018, the University of Applied Sciences Fresenius Munich presented and discussed the topic “Designing Digital Cities” for the first time together with the Academy for Fashion and Design AMD at the Zukunfts Forum (Future Forum) 2018:

  1. How do we live and move in the future?
  2. Which technologies will become important and what does this mean for people?
  3. How does #NewMobility affect our quality of life?

Munich can look to the future, but other cities are currently faster

In the fully occupied Audimax, curator and presenter Dr. Hans-Peter Kleebinder greeted the audience and three global experts from the metropolises of London, Shanghai and Copenhagen with a strong personal connection to Munich with the following question:

What must happen that Munich, as the epicenter of the mobility industry, once again experiences a similar modernization push as it did last in 1972 at the Olympics?  

What are the premises and possible solutions for this?  

Munich has already shown convincingly how to cope with the future: In the only six years from 1966 to 1972, the city made itself fit for its 1972 Olympic Games and catapulted itself forward by a whole generation span with the infrastructure created for this purpose.

Car traffic shapes our cities

Our cities today are infrastructure built around the automobile. The basis for this is the 1920 Athens Charter, which postulated the separation of living, producing and shopping as the basis for global urbanization. This flood of cars has taken over the cities through urban highways and expressways. Almost all other available areas were diverted for parking traffic. In major German cities, traffic and parking space account for around 40 percent of the total urban area, in Los Angeles 80 percent. Nevertheless, people in cars are by no means always mobile. In Beijing, the Chinese capital, people spend 75 minutes a day, well over an hour in traffic jams; that’s about one working day a week. In Los Angeles, motorists spend more than 100 hours a year in traffic jams, in New York over 90, in Munich over 50, in Hamburg, Berlin and Stuttgart 44, in Cologne and the Ruhr 40 – in other words, more than one working week a year even there.

Urbanization as a driver of traffic congestion and air pollution

Contemporary and sustainable quality of life looks different. Once upon a time, the separation of functions in cities should serve, among other things, to improve air quality in residential areas. Today, road traffic pollutes the air everywhere in cities massively. Just one example: In Paris, air quality is the top priority issue for the population;47 percent of respondents cite it first, followed by housing (46 percent) and education (37 percent). Anyone who wants to improve our quality of life must move from outdated auto-centered mobility to “human-centered” #NEWMobility, a new form of mobility that does not reduce voluntary mobility and requires multimodal transport services, i.e. choices between sufficiently short footpaths, sufficiently safe cycle paths, sufficiently frequent buses and trains, and easy transfer options.

  • Collective taxi (in Dubai, electronically linked pods of the start-up NEXT are on the move),
  • car sharing (1.7 million people in Germany used it in 2017) and
  • ride sharing (BlaBlaCar as the EU market leader with 55 million rides in 2017).

A basic requirement of this multi- and intermodal #NEWMobility is its availability, another is its networking. In London, this is done by the Citymapper app and creates transparency about the available means of transport for the mobility route preferred by the individual situation and person. One solution is an app on your smartphone or Smartwatch as a personal assistant for the organisation of individual mobility needs – the travel agency for every route from A to B in your jacket pocket, which individualizes and anticipates and learns to reserve, book and bill for us.  

These possible premises and concrete solutions of one of the climate-neutral, intermodal and networked #NEWMobility outlined the “Future Forum 2018: Designing Digital Cities” of the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences on 16 May 2018 in Munich.

Solutions from Copenhagen, Shanghai and London

Jon Pers, Head of Innovation at the Danish Innovation Center in Munich, presented the example of Copenhagen: The city has to decide what it spends money on: whether for pedestrians, cyclists or the car. In the Danish capital, local politics has given priority to sustainability, liveability and technology, with cycling being given priority 1. The result: 45 percent of commuters come to work or school by bicycle.

Dr. Rainer Daude, responsible for new mobility concepts at the BMW Group, presented “Vision E³ Way”, an innovative solution approach for megacities. E³ stands for “elevated, electric, efficient” – the characteristic features of the idea, which was developed in and for Shanghai: a modular, largely roofed and thus comfortable and safe elevated road over the existing city highways as a model for electrified pedelecs, scooters and motorcycles. The speed of these vehicles will be limited to 25 km/h and electronically controlled – with free driving on intersection-free routes. Will there be robot routes in the future according to this model, lanes for self-propelled cars, alongside car, pedestrian, bicycle and bus lanes?  Munich, as the Future Forum showed, with its mobility-oriented hardware and software companies is predestined for #NEWMobility as a model city and global #NEWMobility hub:

  • Traditional mobility companies such as BMW and MAN and within a radius of only 245 kilometres Mercedes, Porsche and Audi, new mobility offers such as FLIXBUS/Flixmobility, Clunno but also new mobility providers Lilium Aviation, Volocopter, the TU project Hyperloop and
  • new players on the market such as Tesla, Sono Motors, Byton and Faraday and the EU Mobility Cluster of TUM.

So far, however, other cities and metropolises such as Singapore, Dubai, Paris and London have outstripped the Bavarian metropolis.

The author and consultant for #NEWMobility, Lukas Neckermann, who grew up in the USA and works in London and Munich, was not surprised. The more traditional mobility providers, especially automobile manufacturers, are rooted in a location, the more the question of how their jobs can also be preserved in #NEWMobility counts. Neckermann calculated ahead: Private cars, which are usually only used in the morning and evening on the way to and from work, stand around 95 percent of the day unused. In Car-Sharing, cars are used intelligently six times more often than a private car several times a day. If everyone were to use Car-Sharing services and if flexible working hours allowed this, the demand for new private cars could be reduced to one-sixth – a blessing for cities plagued by cars, but an existential problem for car manufacturers. Even if they can cope with climate change with electric cars as a necessary (transitional) solution. Digitization and #NEWMobility will transform the image of our cities

As the discussion moderated by Dr. Hans-Peter Kleebinder at the Future Forum showed, #NEWMobility has not only friends, but also natural opponents. Nevertheless, it must and will come and give answers to the questions:

  • Will our city still look like a city in the future? 
  • Will our car still look like a car in the future?

The digital revolution offers new approaches, solutions and design possibilities for improving our quality of life for a better and more sustainable future for us and our future generations.