Data-based understanding and optimization of sustainability of university mobility: two case studies

Abstract

Recently, Italian universities started to collect data on the mobility choices of their communities, in an effort to move towards more sustainable forms of transport. Two examples will be detailed here. First, to foster a significant shift from car to sustainable transport in commuting, car parking space inside university locations will be allocated using individual “sustainable accessibility” indices favoring people that have real difficulties in adopting more eco-friendly modes of transport. To this end, we harness all available data on public transport services as well as road traffic to assess how fast and comfortable commuting sustainably is compared to traveling by car for any specific individual from home to university. The whole process will be web-based, allowing for fast batch computation of such indices for large numbers of people. Second, since university mobility management includes agreements with suppliers of mobility services (such as sharing), offering incentives for their use, we try to shape such agreements based on a community consultation to determine what are the sharing services subscription arrangements most appealing to interested users, thus maximizing their potential.