Movin’On 2019: How sustainable is your city’s mobility?

In May 2019, Britain reached a major climate combating milestone when it was coal plant power generation free for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. Nonetheless, there is still much work to be done, as transportation still accounts for a large proportion of CO2 emissions worldwide.

We had visited the 2018 Movin’On Summit in Montréal to investigate a number of new, and the re-emergence of some old, transportation technologies that can help us move more sustainably. Old technologies such as re-introducing sails to ocean going ships, and new ones including Mobility as a Service (MaaS) were investigated.

We came back to the 2019 Summit to see the latest climate change solutions and data analysis. This edition offered the more than 5,000 attendees from academia, industry, politics and business a deep dive into the state of rapidly changing mobility options and developments. Despite the change to a larger post-industrial venue than last year’s Summit, the summit kept the vibe – somewhere between tech start up event, corporate trade show and festival spectacle – with dancers and musicians between sessions and trapeze artists swinging from rafters.

The next generation is here

Officially, the five themes of the Movin’On 2019 ecosystem of sustainable mobility Summit were:

• decarbonization and air quality
• multimodal urban transit and society
• innovative technologies
• goods transportation and multimodality
• circular economy

Although the opening panel agreed that there is progress in the right direction on these themes, they are concerned that improvement is not moving fast enough, as do many worldwide concerned about the increasingly rapid pace of climate change.

Whilst Reconnections covers many of these five themes in our weekday Industry Posts and twice weekly Friday Reads, we focus here on other noteworthy developments we discovered at the conference:

• urban mobility indices
• other interesting titbits
• redesigning the humble tyre

City Perspectives

Speakers from around the globe provided updates on recent transportation improvements, and some steps back:

• Singapore has committed to having more than 80% of households be less than 10 minutes from a Metro station by 2023, an impressive goal.

• “By the end of this year, Santiago, Chile could have more electric buses than the whole of the US.” — Costa Rica Limpia, a citizen’s group that promotes clean energy.

• Even with compressed natural gas engines mandated for all vehicles since 2001, greatly improving Delhi’s air pollution from the world’s fourth worst, it is currently, so bad that at simply breathing city air for a day is the equivalent of smoking 44 cigarettes.

Transportation indices

A number of companies have independently developed transportation indices as a better way to compare different types of cities. The masses of data now being collected worldwide can be overwhelming, but such indices allow better comparison between cities. As well as identifying mobility and livability successes and failures.

Kantar/Transdev Mobility Futures Study

Kantar, a leading global marketing insights and consulting company, and French urban transport company Transdev, had unveiled in London on 29 May 2019 a new Mobility Futures programme to help identify the future of urban mobility. Assisted by a network of companies, they surveyed 20,000 people across 31 cities and 53 mobility experts, to discover the political, economic, ecological, technological and socio-cultural factors that are changing mobility decisions in the major cities worldwide.

The project will additionally evaluate acceptance towards new products services and interventions to project a 10-year vision of the urban mobility market, including city-level forecasting and scenario planning. 

Focus areas of the study include:

• consumer travel trends,
• the shift from transport ownership to usage, and
• new mobility concepts and innovations.

Modern life is diversifying, with 9 to 5 commuting decreasing and flexible work increasing. Public transport agencies and cities need to know the emerging travel patterns, to cost-effectively invest in increased capacity.

Kantar has partnered with some of the leading transport agencies and companies to develop the full Mobility Futures study:

Allianz SE, MVV (Munich Urban Transport Network), VBB (Berlin Transport Authority), Michelin, Transdev Group, UN Habitat, Volkswagen and Deutsche Bahn Management Consulting

Kantar delivered their preliminary results at the Summit verbally in French, but the slides were in English, an apt mirror of the increasingly bilingual Canada. The main release occurred in October this year, which we summarise as follows.

Kantar found that whilst some existing drivers do not want to give up their cars, the new generation are starting to show some different mobility choices. Respondents of all ages in Montréal were dissatisfied with the region’s transit, but were quite interested in adopting more active forms of transportation. The continued worsening sprawl complicates things however – and cars are still the top mode choice overall.

In October 2019, Kantar released its full Mobility Futures study – Berlin and Auckland lead the world in urban mobility. The German capital’s cost-effective travel and easy access to a wide variety of public transport infrastructure and ride-sharing services pushed it to the top of the list. The study assesses the affordability and availability of transport options.

This index calculates the availability and affordability of transport options to determine how easy it is for people to participate in city life. The index also factors in income equality, transport costs vs. income, public transport network vs. population size, availability of public transport and the motorisation rate.

Green Commuter Index

Another component of the Mobility Futures study is the Green Commuter index. These cities have the largest proportion of environmentally friendly commuters – those that commute by motorbike, scooter, taxi or ride sharing.

Asian cities lead the way in environmentally-friendly commuting with low proportions of solo drivers and high proportions of walkers, cyclists and public transport users. In Europe, London leads the way as the most environmentally friendly city thanks to its extensive rail and underground network.

Kantar’s Green Commuter Index Top 10

Ranking	City	Score
1	Tokyo	84.7
2	Beijing	78.6
3	Singapore	73.3
4	Nairobi	72.3
5	London	69.6
6	Copenhagen	68.5
7	Seoul	68.1
8	Sao Paulo	66.4
9	Amsterdam	65.2
10	Moscow	64.6

An index of indices

Such indices can ‘flatten’ the globe: the results present Nairobi and Tokyo as peers – something you rarely see. This brings a new, useful perspective to mobility.

From a scientific point of view, they are useless – unless the criteria, weighting, algorithms et al are publicised and tested. Nevertheless, they are useful in that they cause some to question and think about what makes effective public transport. As well as allowing comparison of the relative merits of different cities’ mobility.

The Study suggested that transport on demand solutions might be able to tip travellers away from single occupant vehicles. Potentially this could be Transdev’s angle, to operate a suburban on demand small bus service, which lines up with their business model.

Nevertheless, Kantar did not share key details on how they selected respondents, how they collected the data, etc, leading to questions about the accuracy of their data.

For other modes:

• Amsterdam and Copenhagen, no surprise, rank one and two in Kantar’s Cycle index, with Beijing number three. This largely measures the percentage share of commuters that travel by bike, including bike sharing and ‘pedelec’ electric pedal bikes.

• Tokyo and Manchester are the world’s most walked commuting cities, with 18% and 16% of commuters respectively choosing to walk to work.

Why are indices important?

Understanding commuters’ pain points and emotional response are key to identifying best practices, and where meaningful behavioural change needs to happen.

One conclusion that Kantar drew from its indices are that people are more likely to use transport modes that bring a bit of delight into their daily commute as a lifestyle choice, rather than just a way to get around.

Berlin and Auckland are earning a reputation for being great places to live – which tend to attract bright minds, whilst also improving the mental and physical health of residents. In contrast, unless one lives near the beach, Los Angeles is not a great place to live.

Despite growing environmental concerns, the car is still king – because of its convenience and often necessity. Globally, 39% of urban commuters drive to work alone – more than any other mode of transport.

Kantar also runs the Information Is Beautiful Awards annual information design competition, as featured on Reconnections’ Friday Reads.

Other mobility indices

At the Summit, Accenture also presented their Frugal Mobility Index and Frugal Mobility Observatory, which describe low cost, frugal transport solutions observed across the world:

• The Frugal Mobility Index measures to what extent cities are implementing frugal mobility solutions, and was co-developed with a dozen cities across France, India, Cambodia, Niger, the US and Canada.
• The Frugal Mobility Observatory lists relevant and potentially replicable frugal solutions observed across the world that can serve as a source of inspiration for other cities. This Observatory will be updated yearly, to produce a summary of frugal mobility trends.

In reality however, Accenture’s use of ‘frugal mobility’ is much more about relatively inexpensive micro-mobility (bikeshare, scooters etc) and transport information apps than truly frugal mobility ‘hacks’ that we described from last year’s Summit.

HERE is another index

HERE Technologies has its own free Urban Mobility Index with interesting graphics (not presented at the Summit). The company provides a breakdown for each indexed city – here is their London Urban Mobility Index City Data.

Mobility data snapshots

The Summit also provided a great overview of progress being made globally on various mobility topics. For mobility data:

• “Few people know that China alone, between 2011 and 2013, used as much cement as the United States did in the last century.” – International Research Panel, UNEP

• Private cars accounted for 58% of global passenger miles travelled on Earth in 2018, equivalent to 15 trillion miles.

• The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution killed approximately 7 million people in 2018.

• A Nokia study recently predicted that by 2025 the combined total data generated by sensors around the globe will equal 163 ZB (zettabytes) yearly. (1 ZB = 1 sextillion bytes, or a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes.)

• In 2018, 80 million cars were sold worldwide, 1.7% of which were electrically powered. By 2030 it is estimated that the electric figure could grow to 37% of total cars sold.

There were also some dystopic statements:

• “Mobility has a very strong correlation with development: it’s been shown that the more miles are driven, the more GDP is growing.” – Alliance Renault Nissan Mitsubishi. It is interesting and ironic that a car company would try to promote themselves as a key indicator of progress – rather than a key element of archaic transportation and economic systems that are the prime drivers of many of our contemporary crises such as pollution and vehicular accidents killing and maiming thousands yearly.

• “Autonomous vehicles won’t be parking, they’ll be cruising, so cities need to think about how they’ll make up for almost 40% of [lost] revenue from parking and citations.” – Keolis. Methinks Keolis is really missing the real problem of congestion here.

Time for some corporate responsibility

Whilst not presented at this Summit, Aviva Canada Insurance has recently launched a road safety advocacy campaign, based on their claim data, to reduce the very high financial and personal injury cost of road accidents, and not just for their own insurance policies.

Traditionally, borrowers pay interest rates based on their capacity to repay, meaning that the wealthy generally have easier access to credit. A new form of investment tool is available, however: sustainability-linked loans.

These products are priced based on the sustainability performance of the creditor, with key indicators such as reduced emissions, energy and water use, etc. French bank BNP Paribas recently provided dairy producer Danone with a sustainability-based credit line worth 2 billion euros.

It is hoped that increasing numbers of money managers will invest in financial products based on the environmental, social and governance performance of companies.

We need more such corporate leadership in improving the transport and physical environment – it’s common cents.

Other stats to think about

• In the top 10 most congested cities in the world, each commuter wastes an average 65 hours a year (over eight working days) in traffic.

• The CO2 emitted by the entire airline industry is actually less than the output produced by just three companies: Netflix, YouTube and Facebook.

• Microsoft believes that by 2020, 85% of enterprises will be using artificial intelligence (AI) in at least one process.

• The Air Transport Action Group announced their goal for the aviation industry to reduce their net CO2 emissions to 50% of 2005 levels by 2050.

We need a better tyre

We end our report with the humble rubber tyre – basically unchanged for over a century. Unfortunately, cars are here to stay, so much research and development goes into improving the components.

Michelin unveiled their newest mobility breakthrough: a revolutionary tyre called Unique, Puncture-proof TIre System – Uptis. The result of 10 years of research and new, hi-tech materials, these non-air pressure tyres are puncture-proof, 3D-printable and 100% sustainable. This will lead to much fewer tyre problems and wastage, and helping to avoid the ongoing environmental used tyre fire.

General Motors (GM) calculates that over 200 million tyres are scrapped annually. It takes about seven gallons of oil to make one tyre, which typically are comprised of 28% natural rubber, 28% synthetic rubber made from oil, and 2% carbon black filler—a reinforcing agent produced by burning fossil fuels. This is an incredible amount of raw material for a product that lasts about five years on average.

GM and Michelin saw an opportunity to create an airless tyre has numerous benefits:

• less raw material required
• less energy intensive production
• dramatically reduced number of scrapped tyres due to puncture or damage
• eliminated accelerated wear due to over or under inflation
• safer roads due to far fewer blowouts and flat tyres,
• remove the need for a spare tyre, which will save vehicle weight and space.

As eliminating flats removes the need for replaceable tyres on hubs, the traditional wheel and tyre assembly was redesigned as a simpler to manufacture and lighter single Uptis component. GM will start testing Uptis tyres on a fleet of Chevrolet Bolt electric cars in Michigan in late 2019 and expects to produce them for passenger vehicles in 2024.

Michelin has been developing airless tyre technology since 2005. In 2014 it built a new US$50 million factory which produces Tweel airless tyres for construction and farm equipment vehicles. Michelin states that Tweel tyres provide the same ride as pneumatic tyres. Uptis will be the car production version of the Tweel system. What is not yet known is how much the new tyre will cost and which type and size of vehicles it will best function on. To date Michelin has only been targeting fleet and shared or rented vehicle companies.

Moreover, it is not yet known if Uptis tyres will reduce airborne tyre particulates, one of the major sources of urban pollution.

Our apologies, the original post has been lost, including all of the comments.