Innovations and Transitions for Sustainable Transport

Transport and mobility are changing rapidly - partially as a consequence of technological and societal developments, partially because societies' demands towards the transport system change.

This course is about understanding this changing context and being able to develop and/or assess new ideas and concepts for transportation and mobility.

This is done along the lines of sustainability (requirements), innovation (introducing new ideas) and transitions (radically changing the perspective on transport and mobility).

Sustainability: on basis of (changing) demands in the fields of wellbeing ('people'), economic activities ('prosperity') and the environment ('planet') as well as anticipated developments in demography, economy and spatial development, we analyse the requirements and needs for future transport systems.

The concepts will be discussed during lectures, but you'll work on these during the first part of an assignment as well: identification of main developments and future aims and ambitions for a specific urbanised area, to be described in a base case, Business-as-usual (BAU) and two alternative (near or far) future scenarios.

Innovation: introduction of innovation theory (steps, roles of actors, role of technologies, product life cycle, technology readiness levels, pilots, living labs, upscaling); tools for analysing and assessing 'new' ideas, what is really new, is a new concept really useful, what about interoperability and interconnectivity? Some concrete examples will be discussed, for instance MaaS, mobility hubs and synchro-modality.

The topics will be introduced and discussed in class, and in part two of the assignment you're asked to identify, analyse and assess 'new' transport and mobility concepts yourself.

Transitions: introduction of transition theory and transition management (wicked problems, regimes and regime change; actors, co-evolution, self-organisation, adaptation), illustrated with some concrete examples.

The approach will be discussed in class and in the third part of the assignment you're asked to identify or a potentially 'transitional' development yourself, to identify current regimes and actors, needed changes, barriers and ways to overcome these.

During the fourth part of the assignment you're asked to develop a futuristic transport system based on (assumptions of) spatial and demographic development, complying to sustainability requirements. You've to analyse the potential future use and effects under different future scenarios, develop innovation or transition pathways, identify relevant regimes, key actors, practices and needed changes therein, identify the necessity of co-evolution and the potential of self-organisation/co-makership. Eventually, you'll give an overall assessment of the validity of the envisaged transport system in the chosen setting.