A landmark project has just kicked off for shared mobility.
Global mobility giant Bolt has partnered with one of the world’s leading technical universities ETH Zürich to create a ‘Sustainable Urban Transitions Lab’.
Over the next two years, the research lab will connect Bolt’s frontline data with ETH Zürich’s technical expertise to understand urban mobility patterns in European cities and develop scalable blueprints for implementing shared mobility.
It’s a one-of-a-kind alliance between a shared mobility operator, an academic institution, and cities which are set on amplifying the role of shared mobility in smart, sustainable development.
The project kicks off with €300,000 of investment from Bolt, and two partner cities committed to the cause.
The project mission
Urban mobility is evolving faster than ever. Cities have seen major shifts in transport behaviour in the past few years. The COVID pandemic led to a boom in hybrid work, high cost of living has moved people to city outskirts, and as car ownership declines new modes of shared and sustainable mobility are coming in to take its place.
These trends are reshaping how people move in cities and, crucially, they’re placing pressure on transport authorities and city officials to accommodate their new behaviours.
“Transport and infrastructure projects are some of the biggest financial commitments a city will ever make,” Bolt’s Director of Public Policy Haya Verwoord Douidri tells Zag Daily. “These investments are worth hundreds of millions of dollars so every decision must be data-based and future-proofed.
“This is the mission of our research lab with ETH Zürich – to provide a complete data-driven picture of how people move across cities, and unlock new solutions that help cities make the best financial decisions when implementing shared and sustainable transport.”
It’s a mission that Bolt has invested heavily in, with the two-year pilot project forming part of Bolt’s Urban Fund which launched last year to accelerate the societal benefits of shared mobility worldwide. Recognising the critical and enabling role of transport to connect people to their daily necessities, this fund steers Bolt closer to its ultimate mission of truly creating cities for people and not cars.
The project partners
The Sustainable Urban Transitions Lab aims to bridge the gap between research and real-world policy.
To achieve this, it will leverage Bolt’s real-time frontline data from its micromobility and ride hailing operations across Europe. This includes GPS data, usage patterns, parking data, rider behaviour and more.
Coupled with infrastructure data provided by each partner city, ETH Zürich will then use its technical expertise to refine the findings for city officials to use in transport planning decisions.
This involves understanding how different demographics and socioeconomic groups move throughout the city. ETH will also use simulation models and digital twin technologies to test various mobility strategies – for instance what the impacts would be if cities expanded their public transport systems or implemented mobility hubs.
To provide safety insights, ETH will work with data collected by additional sensors on Bolt’s micromobility vehicles to identify infrastructure hotspots, such as areas where riders brake or swerve harshly.
“Many small and mid-sized cities are confronted with various challenges when they make transport and infrastructure decisions as they have to deal with sparse data and often don’t have an army of researchers to analyse the impacts beforehand,” ETH Zürich Professor for Infrastructure Management Bryan Adey tells Zag.
Doctoral Candidate Orlando Román García adds: “Though more data is being made available from shared mobility, these cities are often not in the optimal position to analyse it or use it for their planning. That’s where the interest for this research lab from partner cities is coming from.”
A “win-win” setup, the project aims to bridge the science-policy gap by combining Bolt’s data with ETH Zürich’s synthesis. “This alliance enables us to form a critical evaluation of how cities’ transport systems have historically performed, what can be done better, and the lessons that other cities across Europe can learn from them,” says Bryan.
The first two partner cities: Seville and Hanover
Seville and Hanover are the first two cities to leverage the Sustainable Urban Transitions Lab.
Marking Seville’s renewed commitment to shared mobility for the next two years, Deputy Mayor Álvaro Pimentel and Director of Mobility Juan García López convened at the city’s launch event yesterday to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Bolt.
Seville has long been a pioneer in active travel, with one of the largest cycling networks in Europe.
But the city has its own set of unique challenges to overcome.
These include 40-degree temperatures that Southern Europe is known for in the summertime, as well as three million tourists every year. Accommodating this surge in visitors – more than three times its own population – in extreme seasonal heat is placing immense pressure on Seville’s public transport system, particularly the city’s single metro line.
Shifting to the North of Europe, Hanover is turning to the Sustainable Urban Transitions Lab to overcome its own set of transport challenges. A world-leading automotive supplier, the city seeks to balance its reliance on private cars with integrated shared mobility. Over the next year, the city is committing itself to identifying the best practices for multimodality, and how mobility hubs can connect shared mobility with regional transport.
“We’re starting with two contrasting cities that each have their own unique obstacles to overcome,” Haya says. “Seville and Hanover are great archetypes for other cities across Europe who face similar transport challenges. With them, we have the potential to develop scalable shared mobility insights that we can bring to the rest of Europe.”
The project’s future
The purpose of this project is not only to generate research, but to convert it into actionable insights for the future of shared mobility and sustainable cities.
What success looks like for Bryan and Orlando is cities developing a new understanding of how to implement shared mobility.
“We want cities to tell us that they didn’t realise the types of infrastructure changes they were proposing would lead to x, y, and z consequences. We then want to make our own proposals and tell them that if they change their infrastructure planning to a, b and c, then it may greatly increase their chances of reaching their sustainable city goals.”
For both ETH and Bolt, success means equipping cities with the resources and knowledge that they wouldn’t have had without this project.
“Many small and mid-sized cities simply don’t have the research teams they need to make smarter mobility decisions,” Haya says.
“We therefore want to leverage Bolt’s frontline position in the industry to give these cities a comprehensive and thorough analysis of their own transport networks. Then, they can convert Bolt’s findings and ETH Zürich’s research into actionable insights for sustainable shared mobility, infrastructure, and urban planning.”
The ultimate goal is for the impact of this project to not be confined within city boundaries.
As Bolt and ETH actively invite more partner cities to join the research lab, the unique alliance aims to develop a blueprint that cities can look to when implementing shared mobility in Europe and beyond.
