On the Move: Transition towards Sustainable Mobility

The negative effects of spatial mobility (e.g. congestion, unsafety, fossil fuel use and land use), create a strong pressure to transition towards a more sustainable mobility system. This asks for trend-breaking change strategies. Decision making on such strategies is however surrounded with many, often deep, uncertainties. Traditional trend-extrapolating models used to explore the future (the traditional ‘predict and act’ paradigm) do not match with this challenge. Therefore this research adopts a ‘monitor and adapt’ paradigm based on a completely different systems approach. It aims for an interdisciplinary and creative way of future thinking, and initiating interventions. This systems approach is based on creative and participative methods for mapping systems, designing and modelling interventions, and visualizing their impacts. To elaborate this approach and supportive tools, the mobility system is conceptualized as an actor-behaviour-triangle with interacting behaviour at different levels. This relates to choice behaviour of consumers, the behaviour of private mobility service providers, and the behaviour of government parties (at all levels) which is expressed in public institutions. Five subprojects are proposed. Three subprojects focus on behavioural analyses: (i) between governmental organisations and consumers (individuals or firms)), (ii) between governmental organisations and service providers, and (iii) between service providers and consumers. In addition, adaptive strategies for the system as a whole are subject of two subprojects, analyzing plausible futures of the system resulting from the decisions of the identified actors in the system.