Article by EIT Urban Mobility: “Cities want to improve urban mobility for residents and achieve their urgent climate goals, but with a dizzying array of possibilities and local constraints, how can local authorities make sure they invest in solutions that respond to users’ real needs? More than that, how can they respond to residents’ true behaviours, not just their reported ones?
Whether it’s winning public trust in the shift to autonomous transport or supporting local communities to be less dependent on cars, citizen engagement puts local communities at the centre of urban transformation, enabling residents to define their unique needs. …
Take the city of Nantes in western France. The city’s urban development agency Samoa wanted to make it easier for people to get around without a car when cycling would not be an option; for those with reduced mobility or in the instances of transporting heavy items, for example.
Supported by EIT Urban Mobility’s RAPTOR programme, Samoa worked with active mobility startup Sanka Cycle to pilot its electric-assisted ‘BOB’ light vehicle to see if and how it could be deployed to replace traditional internal combustion vehicle trips.
In collaboration with urban change agency Humankind, the project deployed citizen engagement tools to better understand how users perceived the light vehicle’s value and what motivators or barriers could influence its acceptance.
Through a mix of field observations with in-depth and flash interviews Samoa and Sanka Cycle were able to gain valuable insights into how people saw the BOB vehicles in comparison to other forms of mobility in order to explore how it might be able to act as a bridge between cars and bicycles. …
Citizen engagement is increasingly gaining traction as a key tool in supporting the shift to sustainable urban mobility.
For the Interact project, which developed a Human Machine Interface (eHMI) for automated public transport buses, communication and trust with passengers was central for successful and ethical deployment. The core challenge however was when the safety driver was removed from the buses, the soft skills drivers bring to their role and their communication with passengers would also be removed. Therefore, learning more about how passengers felt about safety and trust was essential for making this new form of sustainable mobility socially acceptable.
Thus, Interact implemented citizen engagement with Humankind through on-site research and guerilla testing, observations and interviews, and a digital survey in the pilot sites of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Stavanger, Norway. The activity engaged both passengers and safety drivers through interviews to capture their unique perspectives. Important lessons were also learned about the nuances of how people felt about the technology.
In Stavanger, for instance, passengers raised concerns about how extreme weather would impact the system and brought up past experiences with automated systems failing as temperatures dropped. ..(More)”.
