How can bus and rail services be brought together with local private providers to offer citizens useful services? A TU project in the immediate vicinity of the university in Harburg is investigating this.
There are 49 million cars in Germany, and the trend is rising. This is causing problems: Most cars emit CO2 and therefore pollute the climate. They damage health by emitting particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. They build up on the roads and take up space for parking. This is why politicians are focusing on new forms of mobility: car sharing, e-scooters, rental bikes and ridepooling vehicles, a type of shared cab, are intended to supplement bus and train services and convince more and more people to do without their own car. But the challenges are great. While traditional local transport is predominantly in public hands, private companies are often behind the new mobility services. This makes it difficult to plan integrated services and organize joint tariff systems. What's more: "On the outskirts of cities, there is usually neither car sharing nor ridepooling services," says Prof. Carsten Gertz, Head of the TU Institute for Transport Planning and Logistics. "This is often not worthwhile for private providers, who prefer to concentrate on city centers."
Switching easily
KoGoMo" addresses this problem - a project of the "MobilitätsWerkStadt 2025" funding measure, in which municipalities test sustainable mobility concepts. Stations have been set up in the district of Harburg where passengers can easily switch from bus and train to other modes of transport, such as car-sharing vehicles, supported by a smartphone app. Carsten Gertz's team has taken over the scientific monitoring and is integrating the findings into a project-related toolbox that will benefit communities throughout Germany. At the stations, passengers can switch from the Hamburg Transport Association (HVV) to the services of other providers. This is why the stations are called hvv switch points. They are managed by Hamburger Hochbahn. In the urban area north of the Elbe, these switch points have existed for some time. They were new for the Harburg district. Various questions arose before the stations were set up: where should they be built, what options would people like? In order to find out, the KoGoMo project partners organized workshops in which experts and citizens collected ideas and articulated their ideas.
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