Urban Mobility Transition to Sustainability: A System Dynamics Approach

Abstract

Urban Mobility (UM) faces transition, in an era of global transformation under the pressures of increasing urbanization, aging and saturated infrastructures, extreme pollution levels, and technological disruption. Until now, researchers have analyzed the transition of UM through a variety of approaches, focusing mainly in technological issues. Existing studies are mostly qualitative, while quantitative ones usually have partial focus, without considering a whole system being in transition. Policies, initiatives and strategies may result in converging, conflicting or even competing outcomes, as a result of the interaction of the different actors belonging to the subsystems of an examining system. We consider UM as a socio-technical regime in transition, prone to external and internal pressures and equipped with adaptive capacity for a more or less successful transition towards new modes of UM. We illustrate the interactions of the system using system dynamics methodology that helps us capture the dynamics of the multiple interactions taking place at different levels and interacting helices (government, academia, industry, civil society) during the transition process. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.