Fostering the adoption of shared mobility in Smart Sustainable District: various approaches within the Politecnico

According to UN forecasts, 70% of the world's population will live in cities by 2050. In the latest years, old and new models of thinking about urban space have been advanced, such as the '15-minute city' theorised by Carlos Moreno, Smart Sustainable Districts, and Transit Oriented Development.

The authors present the project Smart Sustainable District with a focus on Innovative systems and sharing mobility. The Smart Sustainable District (SSD) project started in 2021 and involved more than one hundred of researchers at Politecnico di Milano (www.poliedra.polimi.it/en/ssd-smart-sustainable-districts/). The main outcome is represented by a White paper that describes principles, solutions, tools for the realisation of the SSD model in urban areas.

In particular, Innovative systems and sharing mobility are discussed in the White Paper as a fundamental mean to favour the modal shift towards low-carbon mobility. The key objectives are to provide viable integrated mobility services alternative to the private car, to exploit new technologies to improve mobility services, to provide mobility services that are environmentally friendly, accessible to all, socially inclusive and finally, to develop MAAS (Mobility as a Service) technologies and services that can facilitate the integration of offers.

Two research groups that contributed to the SSD White Paper present their most recent projects related to shared mobility. The aim of this presentation is showing how modern problems are complex and should be tackled with a combination of different perspectives and different approaches.

Poliedra was involved in 2021-2022 in the Horizon 2020 nuMIDAS project that developed a web toolkit to support decision making for Public Administration in various mobility aspects. In particular a tool to support Shared mobility planning was designed together with the decision makers of Milan. The tool helps to calculate an optimal fleet size of shared vehicles to be deployed in the city as well as to select the most promising zones where to extend the shared mobility services.

The Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB) developed a study on Diversity-aware characterization of individual attitudes and policies towards the adoption of sustainable mobility models: the case of shared mobility. They study showed that human-centric policies can be designed thanks to a data-based characterization of what the authors call users' sharing-DNA and to the understanding of the adoption dynamics guided by social-network interaction. The designed policies, thanks to an innovative control-oriented formulation, act in closed-loop on the users' network, showing that the approach can be effective to contribute to this crucial behavioural change.