What are cities missing when it comes to sustainable travel?

A landmark data-sharing partnership with Hannover and Seville shows how micromobility is being used in the cities, and which factors can contribute to a higher and safer ridership, and which interventions can support the shift towards sustainable urban mobility.

The partnership marks the first time, a city government, a mobility operator, and a leading research university have combined their datasets to produce actionable urban transport recommendations.

Integrating proprietary datasets

The findings were published by Sustainable Urban Transitions (SUT) Lab, a partnership between ETH Zürich and the Bolt Urban Fund, in two comprehensive reports from its first pilot projects with the cities of Hannover and Seville. The pilots pioneer a new approach to the planning process, by integrating proprietary datasets from Bolt, city datasets, in-App Bolt user surveys, as well as ETH Zurich advanced data science and simulation models.

According to the partners, the results show what cities are missing. In Hannover, simulation modelling shows universal first-and-last-mile connections would reduce car trips by 14 per cent and grow public transport use by nearly 20 per cent, with the highest impact mobility hub locations almost all in the periphery, not the centre.

In Seville, route choice modelling across 90,000 e-bike trips confirms that infrastructure availability is the single strongest predictor of where people cycle. Both findings point to the same conclusion: cities making billion-euro transport decisions without operator data are working from an incomplete picture.

In Hannover, the SUT Lab worked with the city planning team on five sub-studies to improve shared e-scooter use, parking regulation, micromobility safety and first-and-last-mile public transport connections, find optimal mobility hub locations and overall to integrate micromobility and public transport in a multimodal system.

“From travel behaviour to safety analyses, and from parking policies to large Metro expansions, our findings in Hannover and Seville provide a new perspective that can better shape how urban transitions are planned”

Research showed 56 per cent of all shared micromobility journeys connect to public transport and only 2.5 per cent of trips compete with it; while further simulation modelling showing universal first-and-last mile connections would reduce car trips by 14 per cent and public transport use would rise nearly 20 per cent.

Crucially, SUT Lab’s analysis and simulations show the highest impact new mobility hub locations lay in peripheral locations, rather than the city centre, recommending locations in Großer Hillen, Misburger Straße, Fasanenkrug, Nordhafen, Ahlem and Anderten-Misburg.

In Seville, the SUT Lab worked with the city on four sub-studies focusing on how cycling, shared mobility, and public transport can work better together; recommending where to improve cycling infrastructure, identifying safety hotspots, pinpointing when and where traffic bottlenecks occur, and analysing how the new Metro expansion can be better integrated with walking, cycling and shared mobility.