Speaker
Description
Many municipalities and public authorities seek to decarbonize transport and inspire a modal shift towards increased walking, cycling or public transport. However, the urban form poses a major obstacle. The sprawling highway infrastructure causes fragmentation of urban regions and wide roads act as barrier for pedestrians and cyclists. It is often impossible to walk, cycle or use public transport because of barrier effects caused by road infrastructure and neighbourhood design (Southworth, 2005). The problem of carbon-intensive car-oriented suburban developments can be addressed with combining mobility hubs and Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). TOD is an urban design alternative to transform car-oriented suburbs into walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that support public transport. Mobility hubs are new public spaces and transport infrastructure aiming to boost the accessibility (the so-called last mile) by offering on-demand mobility systems as shared bikes and electric cars at public transport stations and in surrounding neighbourhoods. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), Mobility as a Service (MaaS) and Intelligent Mobility (IM) links information technology with transport systems in various application areas: journey planning, sharing vehicles, smart parking, smart ticketing, etc. (Mulley et al., 2019). The mobility hubs seek to create a physical impact of on cities by materializing smart transport solutions as spaces on streets and in buildings, on sidewalks or parking lots. The cities responded by creating market packes for parking shared bikes, cars, scooters, etc. There is lots of research on implementation of carpools, shared bikes and shared electric cars under the MaaS paradigm (Hensher, et al., 2020), but few urban design studies of impact of mobility hubs and shared mobility systems on cities with morphological methods. The potential to implement and experiment with mobility hubs is high. Unlike TOD, that seeks to transform entire neighborhoods into transit-supportive walkable environments, the mobility hubs can be established as minor interventions as marking on sidewalks, at urban parking spaces and at suburban Park&Ride facilities that can be transformed into public spaces. Even though there is lots of focus on finding space on sidewalks or streets for shared bikes, cars, scooters, etc., the real potential lies in placemaking of suburban Park&Ride (facilities available for upgrading to mobility hubs). This is the motivation for TOD and mobility hubs urban design innovations and leitmotif to bring urban change and create social impact with mobility hubs.
The mobility hubs create a new buzz as future mobility infrastructure. But to inspire a major change in travel there is a need to create conditions for seamless transfer to shared mobilities based on urban experience of high-quality public spaces. Only with urban design at human scale and establishing mobility hubs as attractive public spaces it becomes possible to inspire higher use of shared mobility systems. This paper discusses how to strategically transform parking spaces and underutilized public spaces into working mobility hubs. It looks at experiments with mobility hubs in Germany, Sweden, France and USA to dissect the design elements of mobility hubs, by characterizing and conceptualizing future public spaces with shared mobility systems. The methodology includes literature review, field observations of mobility hub experiments and mapping the urban design elements (e.g., bike pools on Figure 1 and carpools on Figure 2). The typologies of mobility hubs that will be abstracted based on observation study will be structured based on dimensions (in a context of placemaking see Nativade, 2022), diagrammatized and organized into design guidelines (see Stojanovski, 2020, for typological methodology of analyzing integration of public transport stops and morphological elements, including barrier effects, frontages and segregation from streets).
References
Hensher, D.A., Mulley, C., Ho, C., Wong, Y., Smith, G. and Nelson, J.D., 2020. Understanding Mobility as a Service (MaaS): Past, present and future. Elsevier.
Mulley, C., Nelson, J.D. and Hensher, D., 2019. Inteligent mobility and mobility as a service. In Stanley J. and Hensher, D. A research agenda for transport policy. Edward Elgar Publishing, pp.187-195.
Natividade, V., Rivas, A., Büttner, B. and Stojanovski, T., 2022, April. The morphology of placemaking–from urban guerrilla and formal street experiments to mobility and metropolitan regions. In Annual Conference Proceedings of the XXVIII International Seminar on Urban Form:" Urban Form and the Sustainable and Prosperous City" (pp. 1335-1343).
Southworth, M., 2005. Designing the walkable city. Journal of urban planning and development, 131(4), pp.246-257.
Stojanovski, T., 2020. Urban design and public transportation–public spaces, visual proximity and Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). Journal of Urban Design, 25(1), pp.134-154.
| Keywords | Mobility hubs; Transit-Oriented Development (TOD); public spaces; shared mobility |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
