In answer to the global urbanisation challenge, this joint project contributes to urban public administration and innovational services development with respect to innovative urban mobility management, development and implementation.

The continued trend of urbanization and the resulting boom of cities throughout the developing and developed world requires an expansion of infrastructure systems unprecedented in both scale and rapidity. Sustainable cities and communities include the target to provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all. The expansion of conventional private car and mass-transit systems are not capable of keeping up with the rapid growth in demand.

Moreover, it fails to provide inclusivity, as it is often not possible or convenient for the elderly or people with disabilities to use them. Therefore, it is of strategical and operational importance to find innovative solutions to complement traditional private car and public transport modes.

Advancements in social networking, location-based services, wireless networks, and cloud technologies are contributing to the innovative urban mobility management, development and implementation. Due to these advancements in technology, the changing mobility patterns and the combination of economic, environmental, and social forces, it brings global urbanisation challenges with respect to sustainable urban public administration and services innovation.

This project aims to deal with these challenges for achieving innovative and sustainable urban mobility in the process of urbanization. The project encompasses modelling approaches and experiments to be developed for and carried out in China and Europe, notably projects involving the use of innovative instruments i.e. automatic/electric Driving (Shared Electrified Autonomous Vehicles, SEAVs), Tradable Credits Scheme (TCS), shared parking, bike/car sharing, and policy integration and stakeholders coordination mechanisms. It also involve the public administration mechanisms of these innovational services with the approaches of mobility policy, administration, and data management, sharing and standardization.

An important example concerns the use of tradable driving credits. While these projects give us insight in how we can affect behavior of urban travelers to achieve a more sustainable outcome, we also study the long-run consequences and spatial interaction, e.g. via land use, that will be decisive for the ultimate impacts of policies. We do this through the development of urban network models that will be calibrated both for Chinese and European cities. We will undertake our research in close collaboration with cities. The project thus contributes to the development and evaluation of innovative urban mobility policies, both from the short-run and long-run perspectives, while allowing for highly innovative behavioural and modelling research.

Moreover, shared mobility service, e.g., bike/car sharing, has the potential to drastically reduce the number of vehicles on the roads, thereby mitigating traffic congestion and reducing local air pollution. Furthermore, it can reduce the emission of global greenhouse gases and provide mobility services tailored to special needs. It is extremely difficult to overcome the path dependence created by private-car-use-enabled urban growth, as many examples of sprawling cities in the developed world demonstrated. Chinese cities have experienced the most rapid population growth worldwide and have been remarkably innovative in terms of technological developments. Recent studies have shown that technologies successfully trialled in Chinese cities have the greatest potential to lead to disruptive innovation in other cities, too.