The main challenge in relation to getting city dwellers to drop private car ownership and start using buses, trains, cat sharing, carpooling, city bikes, collective scooters and other green alternatives can be summed up in just one word: comfort.

Senior researcher Toke Haunstrup Bach Christensen from the Department of the Built Environment has been leading the project SIMS (Sustainable Innovative Mobility Solutions) since 2019. In this project, Aalborg University and a series of partners in greater Copenhagen have been looking at the factors that determine what makes us choose collective transport solutions over private car ownership in our day-to-day transportation.

- One of the things we have come across in the project is the challenge related to the first mile – last mile issue. Collective means of transportation cannot bring you alle the way from your doorstep to your workplace and back, or all the way to your summer house or the shopping center. Unless you live right next door to a bus stop, there is usually always some distance to traverse, he says.

Mobility as a Service

To accommodate this, the SIMS project has been working on combining collective means of transportation into one unified solution. Ideally, this would mean that you do not have to go through the trouble of having to book a city bike to get to the station, buy a ticket for the train, a ticket for the bus and maybe a shared car to get all the way. Instead, the entire journey would be booked at the push of a button. At a fixed, low cost, explains Toke Haunstrup Bach Christensen.

The concept is called ‘Mobility as a Service’ (MaaS). Consumers buy a trip from A to B without having to worry about alle the individual steps of the travel itinerary.

While the end goal of MaaS is a fully integrated digital solution, SIMS has primarily been targeting the development of mutual subscription solutions across various transportation providers.

Creatures of habit

One of the obvious advantages of MaaS is that you can often avoid getting stuck in jams or other delays in city traffic. Partly because there will be less cars on the road at any given time, but also because the system can quickly guide the travelers along alternative routes or alternative means of transportation. This way, transport planning becomes way more dynamic, flexible, and adapted to fit the particular trip.

Even though it may sound enticing, a surprisingly large amount of participants in the project were not particularly impressed with at the prospect of cheap, easy, and hassle-free transportation.

- Our daily commute is extremely based on routines. We really don’t want to take the bus one day, carpool the next and a city bike the third if the sun is shining. We are creatures of habit, and if this means that we have to sit in a queue for half an hour and occasionally be late for work because we insist on driving our own private car, then that is a price we are willing to pay, says Toke Haunstrup Bach Christensen.

Cars must be a hassle

To persuade big city dwellers to drop car ownership, stricter means must be applied, he says. It must be expensive and troublesome to a degree that outweighs the comfort of having your own car ready and waiting in the street. As an example of how this could be achieved, he mentions the newly renovated Nordhavn district in Copenhagen. Here it is close to impossible to find a parking space in the streets, instead cars must be parking in garages that are often located a long way away from residential properties – at a fixed price of around 1.000,- DKK a month.

- If you have to walk several hundred meters to get to the garage where your car is parked – passing a number of carshare parking spots on the way – and paying 12.000,- DKK every year in parking fees, many car owners would reconsider whether the comfort comes a too high a cost. Sustainable transportation in the cities will get a breakthrough much faster if we take it into account when we plan the layout of the cities, concludes Toke Haunstrup Bach Christensen.

Aalborg University’s partners in the SIMS project include Roskilde University, LetsGo A/S, City- and Commuter Bike Foundation, Rejseplanen A/S, FDM, CPH City and Port Development, Nærheden P/S and The Technical and Environmental Administration, Municipality of Copenhagen.