Where are the low-hanging fruits? Strategic mapping of potential consumers of shared e-mobility to help decarbonise mobility of our cities.

In marketing research, the concept of ‘low-hanging fruits’ refers to those consumers who are easiest to attract to a business. Focusing efforts on this group maximizes the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. In mobility planning, this concept could be adopted by city planners more often to achieve sustainability goals.Imagine that a start-up just launched a new model of shared e-scooter in a busy town like Rotterdam. It is natural to expect that, for the sake of financial sustainability, a significant part of the revenue should come from neighbourhoods that cluster factors of success for potential usage (e.g. commercial activities, jobs, good infrastructure). However, if shared e-mobility is meant to cause significant and positive impact on sustainability, helping cities achieve their goals, further structural changes in travel habits are certainly necessary. In short, part of the ‘unnecessary’ car trips should be more often replaced by more sustainable modes, like shared e-mobility. ‘Unnecessary’ is interpreted in this study as a car trip that has a similar profile (e.g. length, travel time, socioeconomics) of a shared e-mobility trip, and therefore could be ‘avoided’ or ‘replaced’ by more sustainable alternatives. The individuals making those trips are called ‘low-hanging fruits’, but are ‘not yet consuming the product’. How to map low-hanging fruits? In this study, an approach is proposed to help providers and cities strategically map them. The approach is operationalised in the context of the Netherlands, a country where shared e-mobility is spreading quickly. The approach can be divided in 3 major phases: 1) Characterising a typical ‘avoidable’ car trip in the context of a given population (city, region, country), through the investigation of how current users of shared mobility travel (e.g. trip distance, duration) and their characteristics (e.g. age, gender, income); 2) Mapping where the avoidable car trips are generated, since countries like the Netherlands keep their Household Travel Surveys up to date so that city planners can use that information to extract insights of travel habits (desire lines, purpose, mode, etc); 3) Labelling locations in regard to their likelihood of having more or less low-hanging fruits, through the application of unsupervised learning (k-means) to find probable clusters of low-hanging fruits. In order to achieve (1), we used an anonymous, ‘privately acquired’ shared mobility OD travel matrix produced in 2020 by a third party mobility company. This OD refers to trips done by e-scooter users of Rotterdam during the summer of 2020. For (2), we explored the latest Dutch Household Travel Survey (2020) and combined it with (1). This type of survey provided annual information about daily travel patterns of more than 60.000 people. The Dutch HTS can also be expanded to mitigate negative impacts of data collection biases and be a reasonable representation of how the whole population travels on a daily basis. In (3), we combined insights extracted from (2) with Census information to perform the unsupervised classification of locations. We propose and operationalise a pragmatic approach to help cities and mobility providers identify potential users of shared mobility. If shared mobility could seduce more low-hanging fruits, significant environmental impacts from modal shift could be achieved. Some use cases of this exercise can be applied to:(i) size potential market for expansions (e.g. deployment of vehicles or installation of facilities); (ii) size potential impacts of modal shift on city-wide Co2 emissions; (iii) design subsidies that encourage providers to deploy assets in certain areas; (iv) change fees depending on the potential to attract former private vehicle users; (v) investigate reasons behind the existence of avoidable car trips. 

Factors Contributing To Winter Cycling: Case Study of A Downtown University Campus In Toronto, Canada

Cycling rates in many North American cities decline significantly in winter months, which is a major challenge for practitioners and advocates in advancing active transportation-related policy, planning, and programs. This research investigates Ryerson University as a major commute destination. By combining a student and employee transportation survey, this research examines characteristics associated with winter cycling. Our results indicate that women (OR=0.38) and transit pass holders (OR=.12) were less likely while students rather than staff (OR=1.69) were more likely to cycle during the winter. The density of dedicated bicycle facilities within 500m of the shortest route was positively associated with all-season cycling (OR = 1.57). Also, a cyclist living in a more stable neighbourhood was more likely to bicycle through winter (OR=4.33), when compared to cycling only in warmer seasons. These findings will be useful to city planners considering how to encourage winter cycling to urban university campuses and/or major downtown employment centres.

Factors Contributing To Winter Cycling: Case Study of A Downtown University Campus In Toronto, Canada

Cycling rates in many North American cities decline significantly in winter months, which is a major challenge for practitioners and advocates in advancing active transportation-related policy, planning, and programs. This research investigates Ryerson University as a major commute destination. By combining a student and employee transportation survey, this research examines characteristics associated with winter cycling. Our results indicate that women (OR=0.38) and transit pass holders (OR=.12) were less likely while students rather than staff (OR=1.69) were more likely to cycle during the winter. The density of dedicated bicycle facilities within 500m of the shortest route was positively associated with all-season cycling (OR = 1.57). Also, a cyclist living in a more stable neighbourhood was more likely to bicycle through winter (OR=4.33), when compared to cycling only in warmer seasons. These findings will be useful to city planners considering how to encourage winter cycling to urban university campuses and/or major downtown employment centres.

Growing Healthy City Canopies

In our June issue, Eos looks at how scientists and city planners are partnering to protect our vital urban forests.

Epilogue Imagining future cities

“Imagining future cities” contrasts the idea of the human city with the robot city, an idea that is never far away from the cities of the future we see in science fiction films. As some of these future visions demonstrate, the ideal city contains elements of both the human and robot city and is powered by big data and technological developments, as well as human connections and recognizable hubs like the bar, bazaar, and branch library. As well as function and commerce, city planners of the future will need to remember the roles of community and interaction in keeping cities alive.

The changing landscape of unofficial signage in a U.S. refugee relocation city

This Linguistic Landscape project investigates public signage throughout one year in a small Pennsylvania refugee relocation city, exploring the linguistic diversity of the city’s numerous generations of newcomers. The diachronic analysis indicates that monolingual government signs conflict with multilingual signs in private businesses, demonstrating that newcomer business owners are willing to meet the needs of refugees and immigrants even if the government will not. The lack of official multilingual signage calls into question what obligation government city planners in refugee relocation areas have to accommodate their linguistically diverse newcomers. The results of this project also reveal that the Linguistic Landscape is dynamic, as suggested by new languages that are layered on top of evidence of earlier generations of immigrants and by changes to signs within one year.

Tube Housing as Dominant System and Everyday Urban Culture of Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is a typical 21st-century mega-city coping with informal hyper-growth. Government planners are under pressure to provide mass housing, transit and utilities. Yet HCMC has developed a distinctive and effective homegrown informal housing system based on ‘tube housing’. This system of dense housing, motorcycle transport and laneways embodies an integrated everyday urban culture whereby each of its purposes (work, commerce, rest and recreation) in turn shapes the whole urban form. As such, it is argued that these everyday forms of urbanism should be respected and incorporated by city planners into their masterplans rather than be viewed as anachronistic, illegal forms to be overcome and deconstructed.