Back to the future of (sustainable) mobility

How the Covid-19 crisis can lead to an acceleration in sustainable urban mobility

The biggest event for me in 2020 should have been my long-planned orthopaedic surgery. I prepared for this operation for several years and never expected it to be overshadowed by anything much bigger. But instead of a quiet recovery, I joined the global lockdown at home with my family like millions of others, panting after my children on crutches while my wife works from our guest room. During the quieter moments, I’ve had a fair amount of reading and thinking about the implications of this unprecedented crisis.

Over the last 30 days, I could observe the reassuringly quick resurgence of local communities, the power of public-private collaborations, how different governments approached citizen responsibility and finally the rise of cities' authorities in managing the crisis. The primal human need for safety make these trends strong and when combined with the general state of disruption, this is a historic opportunity for change as shown by the proliferation of pledges for a better world post Covid-19.

As countries are now proceeding to find lockdown exit strategies, people and organizations look at what will happen after the confinement. I started drafting this article a couple of weeks back, it shares reflections on people and goods mobility under new health and safety norms and reveals several hints on the key enablers to operate a much-needed shift to sustainable urban mobility.

The Covid-19 global pandemic will change people’s lives and how cities and businesses operate. The period that will follow the initial confinement phase will call for unusual practices from companies and regulators to protect employees from recurring infection waves, to produce strategies for a comeback of economic stability and to trigger innovations to ensure sustainability under higher health and safety standards.

When it comes to urban mobility, this is a moment of choice for business and city leaders to embrace collaboration if not done yet. Together they can prevent a transport crisis that would further hinder recovery and avoid the future perils of “going back to normal”. Simply put, they should prevent a rush to single-occupancy driving and promote the use of public transport and multimodality in general.

This is of material importance, because trains, buses or roads and the existing transport infrastructure in general simply can’t absorb traffic under the new health and safety conditions, not to mention the mental barrier they imply. To have an impact, we should consider how to apply a set of complementary measures to a large portion of the population. By establishing new public-private collaborations and leveraging the latest technologies and knowledge in data sharing, cities and businesses can use this crisis to pivot the course of the transformation of their mobility systems and lead to new shared-value creation.

Digital Mobility Service Providers (MSPs) have proved their relevance in the urban mobility landscape over the last ten years with high user acceptance and complementarity to traditional mobility options. We see many cities now convening local MSPs or transport operators and authorities will allow cities to aggregate the know-how to answer the new challenges of urban mobility and activate a “local mobility ecosystem”.

The next step would consist in setting-up several mobility-related coalitions to create and operate new models for the mobility of people and goods and their implications on the usage of space. Each coalition would gather the local mobility ecosystem players and the key private and public stakeholders that can influence the movement of people or goods.

The people mobility coalition, a collaboration between the local mobility ecosystem, business and the authorities, will have the objective to enable efficient and clean mobility while preventing the spread of the virus. The natural first step is to coordinate commuting patterns to create new access policies aiming at spreading commuter’s trips over time, reducing chances to spread the virus and safely managing the flow of people within infrastructure capacity. For example, they could consider coordinating the implementation of the (most probably) permanent measures of teleworking, so that group A of companies allow teleworking the first two days, and group B the last two days of the week. The coalition could go further and consider using the current closure of schools to coordinate starting times by districts so that all families in one sector of the city would travel at a certain time before another sector does or students and older professionals do.

The new access policy should be consensus-based and promote several criteria like social integration, emergency response or the criticality of trips while leaving a degree of flexibility to share responsibility with citizens. Deploying these rules would ideally coincide with a widespread and coordinated launch of teleworking and the opening of new co-working spaces as part of an agreement amongst leading local businesses of the coalition (see section on space further below).

The coalition dealing with the mobility of people should also consider ways to change commuting behaviors. The immediate objective is to prevent single-occupancy driving and promote shared multimodality with measures ranging from public transport incentives (under high hygienic and distancing standards) to stricter measures to reduce access to city centres or main corridors for single occupancy vehicles. Digital applications for tracing infected people now used in many countries could make safe car-sharing (or public transport) possible. At the same time, the end of lockdowns is very timely to implement access restrictions as there is less traffic and people are more inclined to accept it.

Regulating the access for motorized vehicles could be combined with measures encouraging active and individual mobility modes. We already see increased usage of bikes allowing social distancing and safe travel while traffic is at its minimum, and several cities are taking advantage of this to increase the number of bike lanes. The coalition could consider incentivizing citizens whose commuting time is below the “ideal” access time (different for each city) to shift to active modes gradually. For example, collaboration with local businesses to provide a test fleet of shared electric bikes, cargo bikes or scooters to certain groups (and lanes to use them) will accelerate the adoption of clean modes of transport. Over time, this will answer short distance mobility needs existing at the local level due to the emergence of community sourcing practices and could help to crystallize new small local economic hubs.

Regarding the movement of goods, the pressure on existing supply chains and the need for more efficient and resilient urban deliveries should lead the local logistics stakeholders to consider new operating models. One immediate opportunity is to coordinate policies on time and curb-space usage for urban logistics to manage the existing capacity of the road infrastructure. For example, using the “new access policy” mentioned earlier could allow coordinating deliveries while preventing congestion. Another way to achieve efficiency and resilience would be to mutualize several vehicles for deliveries – we have seen examples of this for medical supplies. This could be done by creating a delivery jobs aggregation platform that would gather the demand for packages to be delivered across several operators and manage the capacity of vehicles available and their routing. Several examples exist on how to manage such a platform, set the parameters and share the financial benefits across members, and companies have developed expertise in optimizing large fleets with complex patterns. The goods movement coalition would also be a platform to accelerate existing electrification plans (vehicles and infrastructure) and delivery infrastructure implementation (i.e. shared warehouses, delivery lockers).

Achieving impact and allowing operations for some of the measures mentioned earlier requires cities to look at two enablers: the management of space and the digitalization of mobility.

As a first enabler, the people and goods mobility coalitions would communicate with a dedicated space management coalition gathering urban planning, land management and real estate public and private players. This group of experts should actively coordinate and answer the needs for space to enable the changes emerging in the new mobility patterns. As seen before, the immediate need is to create new bike lanes to allow safe cycling and accompany the active mode incentives mentioned earlier. Documentation is readily available on how to create pop-up lanes before going for more structural changes to the infrastructure. But many other space requirements will emerge.

Another opportunity on space management may arise with the economic downturn following the Covid-19 confinement. Many local (and global) businesses will look for alternative revenue sources and costs reductions. As owners or tenants of space, they have an opportunity to rent or re-use their space to satisfy emerging needs from the new mobility patterns outlined earlier. For example, a local restaurant or small company could rent its space for co-working to teleworkers who cannot work from home or are on the move. Furthermore, these businesses may well have a parking spot or a garage that could be used as a dropping of docking space for shared bikes or scooters and create a mobility hub. The same may happen over time with high-value city-centre office space which companies will quickly see as unnecessary expenditure when teleworking will have made its way into working habits. This space could enable new urban logistics practices such as delivery lockers or shared warehouses, or even create housing projects contributing to reducing urban sprawl on the longer term.

The second key enabler is the digitization of mobility. Considering that Data-sharing at the city or regional level may anyway be essential to realize stricter public health and safety norms, this is about accelerating digitization by applying it to transport. This critical capacity will guide decision-making in use cases like the creation of a Mobility as a Service (MaaS), implementing the “new access rule”, urban logistics efficiencies, city fleets managements, new space allocation or any other. The data-sharing capacity should be created by the local mobility ecosystem and operated by a neutral entity to ensure trust from the public and allow a sound balance of influence from public and private players forming the ecosystem.  

To conclude, while this short article doesn’t pretend to provide all solutions and measures, it proposes a pathway based on collaboration and technologies to provide transport solutions and make mobility more sustainable. It takes efforts to change, and the Covid-19 crisis shows that change happens if we want to. These ideas should be shared, enriched and trigger new ones so that all can benefit from it. I was eager to share these thoughts with John Batten, Niels van Geenhuizen, Susanna Zammataro, David Lainé, Daniel Deparis, Franco Annunziato, Miguel Gaspar, Nancy Vandycke who expressed interest and enriched with their views. I believe we have a collective responsibility to address this crisis while avoiding the next one, and as nations are planning to lift the lockdowns, the conversation starts now.