At a Breakfast briefing at the Spring Plenaries in London last week, we had the pleasure to listen to Mr Philipp Rode, Director of LSE Cities and joint Research Director of the “Towards New Urban Mobility” paper.

Mr Rodd presented the report ‘Towards New Urban Mobility: The case of London and Berlin’ which provides insight into how urban transport policy can better leverage new and emerging mobility choices in cities.

Today the policy makers must embrace an increasing number of alternatives, including cycling and walking as main modes of travel, bike and car sharing, multimodal travel options and electric vehicles, as changes in urban mobility patterns no longer follow traditional patterns of motorization. Smartphone applications now support people’s travel decisions as they move through the city, opening possibilities of combining public transport, taxi services and shared car use.

Policy interventions more likely to result in changes

This study identified six mobility attitude groups, where the attitudes towards travel, the environment, technology use and residential preferences were used to identify mobility attitude group.  Attitudes and values are key factors in the choice of transport modes since they reflect group specific needs, constraints and preferences in travel.

This report argues that policy interventions sensitive to group attitudes are more likely to result in behavioural change towards transport alternatives. This includes understanding which transport alternatives are more acceptable to each group and how best to target communication.

This report ties very well to the Action Plan from the working group “Transport and Mobility ” Committee 1,  Knowledge sharing on “Nudging”.

Update Regional Airports

The next speaker at our breakfast briefing, was our AER expert on Regional Airports, Mr Roger Estefors. He gave us an update on the current changes in regulation concerning regional airports and the usage of ERDF and regional airports.