During the Virtual ITS European Congress on the 9-10 of November, the TM 2.0 ERTICO Innovation Platform hosted the session ‘Mobility out of the Box – Why do we move?’. It is the third year that ‘Mobility out of the Box’ was held during the ITS European Congress and as was the case in the previous European ITS Congresses, the discussion raised a lot of interest within the Congress and also on social media.

This session investigated the reasons why people move. Is it a need or a desire? Do we travel because we have to or is it because we wish to? Will the current pandemic measures impact mobility in the long term? Can real-time operational and demand data answer why we move? 9 ITS and Mobility experts and stakeholders have answered this question from their own angle and have addressed multimodality, the 15-minutes city concept, the nudging of travellers, human biology, and emotions and have explained how this links to mobility.

Each speaker in their 4 minute pitch, provided a statement on their vision, and we are now launching a survey (here) where you too can provide us with feedback, including your own answer to the question “Why do we move”? The survey will be available until the 25th of November.

A few words about the topic of this year’s ‘Mobility out of the Box’ topic:

During the session, a strong focus was put on the impact of the recent pandemic, with the change of attitude of employers towards ‘homeworking’. Many employees do not have to travel anymore for work, as almost all our meetings take place on line, and many expressed their interest in working from home for the rest of their professional career. Will this disruption affect our cultures and human behaviour permanently?

On one hand, automation in traffic management, multi-modal travel planning and MaaS are offering us the opportunity to continue our travel and mobility patterns as we did before the pandemic and with as less impact as possible. On the other hand, the public measures taken to contain the pandemic, climate change and the turn of public policy towards setting sustainable and green objectives in, among other areas, transport, have brought a change of attitude towards both vehicles and mobility as a whole.

Currently, the concept of shared mobility is losing ground while private vehicles and privately owned micro-mobility vehicles seem to have gained the trust of the users. New forms of business models are being sought in order to ensure that our transport systems are both agile and resilient.

What do you think?

Please find the QR code here:

Thank you for participating in this very interesting survey. The final results will made available in the ERTICO Newsletter during the first week of December 2020.