New mobility for urban periphery

Challenge description

In many European cities, various new mobility services have been established in recent years that enrich and complement the existing mobility system, but also bring it under pressure and require organisation. Vienna represents an attractive market for sharing and pooling services, ride hailing, and other mobility services.

Thanks to the strong public transport sector in Vienna, the city has a pleasing "modal split" (distribution of travellers to different modes of transport). For some years, however, there has been a stagnation in the areas of public transport (ÖV) and motorized private transport (MIV).  Although free-floating and station-based carsharing and the city’s bikesharing system have been offered by private companies for many years, e-scooters, free-floating bicycles, but also Uber, Bolt, etc., have recently added momentum to mobility services in Vienna.  At the same time, the widespread use of mobile, digital devices and new technologies for public and private transport allow an ever more flexible organisation of mobility in Vienna.

In the logic of private mobility service providers, their business is most lucrative in urban areas with high population and job density. However, these new services may result in counterproductive effects as rides in the city centre, for example, are shifted from public transport to less sustainable forms of transport, and at the same time no additional new forms of mobility and services are established on the less populous periphery of the city and in the surrounding areas. In order to cushion or reverse such negative developments, new ideas, concepts, business models and data analyses are needed.

Challenge vision

For this reason, creative answers to the following questions should be developed:

1) How could eco-friendly mobility services in urban peripheral areas be expanded? How can commercial mobility services work in less densely populated areas? Which framework conditions do non-commercial / private (sharing) approaches require?

2) How should mobility services be designed to be accepted by users (e.g. commuters) as an alternative to private cars? (Form, availability, costs, combination possibilities etc.)

3) How must public space be designed in order to promote sustainable forms of mobility? (Contribution of spatial planning and traffic management, incentives and regulations etc.)

4) How could solutions for specific mobility corridors to Vienna look like? Which approaches can be pursued in the entire Viennese "commuter belt"?

5) How can data analysis contribute to the development of mobility services in urban peripheral areas? (Use of e.g. traffic and social statistics or social media data etc.)

Solutions should focus on:

• Collection of ideas on how mobility services can be expanded in urban peripheral areas with lower population density or public transport development (within and outside the city limits of Vienna) and how they can be designed ecologically and socially
• If possible, work on all issues as part of an overall concept
• Focusing on individual issues (e.g. data analysis) or urban areas / mobility corridors is also possible

Non-targets:

• Concepts that focus exclusively on the expansion of the Vienna public transport network

This Challenge is hosted by Wiener Linien, Vienna’s public transport company. The winning team will have the opportunity to present their idea in an innovation format to the management of the Wiener Linien and at the same time get to know the innovation portfolio of the company.