Integrated Urban Mobility Policies in Metropolitan Areas: A System Dynamics Approach for the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region in Germany

Melkonyan Ani; Koch Jennifer; Lohmar Fabian; Kamath Vasanth; Victoria Munteanu; J Alexander Schmidt; Raimund Bleischwitz

doi:10.1016/j.scs.2020.102358

Integrated Urban Mobility Policies in Metropolitan Areas: A System Dynamics Approach for the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region in Germany

Sustain Cities Soc. 2020 Jul 1:102358. doi: 10.1016/j.scs.2020.102358. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Melkonyan Ani¹, Koch Jennifer², Lohmar Fabian¹, Kamath Vasanth³, Victoria Munteanu¹, J Alexander Schmidt⁴, Raimund Bleischwitz⁵

Affiliations

¹ University of Duisburg-Essen, Centre for Logistics and Traffic, Oststraße 99, 47057 Duisburg, Germany.
² University of Oklahoma, Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, 100 E Boyd St, SEC Suite 510, Norman, OK 73019, USA.
³ TA Pai Management Institute of Manipal, PB. NO. 8, Manipal, 576104, Karnataka, India.
⁴ University of Duisburg-Essen, Joint Center of Urban Systems, Department of City Planning and Urban Design, Universitätsstr. 12, 45141 Essen, Germany.
⁵ Sustainable Global Resources, Director of The Bartlett School of Environment Energy & Resources (BSEER), UCL Energy Institute, UCL Institute for Sustainable, ISR, Central House, 14 Upper Woburn Place, London, WC1H 0NN, United Kingdom.

Abstract

In today's world, urban systems play an important role in sustainable economic development. In particular, urbanisation trends and the increasing demands of urban mobility place additional pressure on existing transportation infrastructure, and this creates new challenges for urban planners in terms of developing integrated and sustainable urban mobility policies. Here, we take a novel and holistic approach to analysing transformative pathways towards sustainable urban mobility, considering the complex dynamics in metropolitan regions. To achieve this, we develop a toolset to assess the impact of potential measures to be taken by decision makers. Our innovative approach is based on the introduction of a new system framework to link the interrelated sector parameters of mobility systems by considering the effects of innovative mixed methods (both qualitative and quantitative) on scenario development and evaluation on the basis of global trends at the macro scale and their specific influences on the mobility sector at the local scale. To this end, we used a participatory modelling approach to develop scenarios and evaluate them as integrated simulation runs via a comprehensive and holistic system dynamics (SD) model. Thus, we estimated dynamic interdependencies between all of the factors relating to the mobility sector and then assigned business decision-making criteria to the urban systems. Furthermore, we introduced a sustainable net present value framework to estimate the sustainability outcomes of government investment in urban mobility infrastructure. A case study relating to the Rhine-Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region in Germany was applied in order to simulate four scenarios co-created with stakeholders involved in our study, namely, Smart City, Sustainable/Healthy City, Deurbanisation and Business-as-Usual (BaU), which served as a solid basis from which to quantify path dependencies in terms of policy implementation. At the same time, recommendations were derived for sustainable mobility transformation within metropolitan regions.

Keywords: Sustainable urban mobility; metropolitan regions; scenario evaluation; system dynamics; urban economics.