Intermodal urban mobility: users, uses, and use cases

Abstract

Cities are growing nowadays and so is their citizens’ demand for mobility. On a global scale, motorized individual traffic is hardly capable of meeting this need due to its ownership costs and due to the lack of an accordingly large infrastructure. Besides, motorized individual traffic is responsible for the majority of today's traffic burdens, such as air pollution, traffic jams, noise, and accidents. It is thereby assumed that only a combination of soft transport modes and public and private modes of motorized transport with different capacities, time schedules, and operation times can achieve what is called “sustainable cities”. Besides the need for coordinated transport services, their cooperation must be assured to obtain seamless interchanges and consequently undisturbed, fast, and reliable travelling. Such a use of different transport modes within a single journey is called “intermodality” and is a work topic fostered in a national, European, and world-wide context. This report shows the initial results of the project “UrMo” (“Urban Mobility”) that is being performed at three institutes of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The report gives an introduction to the topic by evaluating how socio-demographics and space structure influence intermodal behavior. In addition to this, the subsequent project steps are outlined.