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By Fintan Burke, European Science Communication Institute
The Swiss city of Winterthur plans to become carbon neutral by 2040. It has started to invest heavily in sustainable transport, namely its train stations and bus network.
Although the city is well connected to other areas of the country, internally it faces several bottlenecks. Rail and bus passengers squeeze past each other when making connections. Its rail line bisects the city, creating choke points for traffic.
”In the mobility sector, there is a lot to do to – promote and enhance more sustainable mobility modes, especially in public transportation,” says Prof. Vicente Carabias-Hütter of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences’ (ZHAW) School of Engineering. In 2019, he was appointed the manager of Winterthur’s Smart City Department.
To relieve the pressure, the city is investing in a new bus terminal at its central station and revitalising a second station called Grüze five kilometres away.
A car-free bridge to Grüze is being built over the railways and expected to be finished by the end of 2026. The bridge will be the biggest in the city and help Grüze become the city’s second transportation hub.
Carabias-Hütter says the bridge will carry pedestrians, city busses and cyclists. Trains and bus timetables will also be synchronised to keep waiting times down.
Researchers hope that the lessons learned from this redevelopment can help Europe at large on how to better connect transport systems.
The EU-funded MOVEO project is designing aways to bridge connectivity gaps and shape the future of Europe’s transportation. Part of that involves learning how passengers move from one form of transportation to the next.
The project is organised into five areas of research, ranging from creating seamless multi-modal transport services, designing digital replicas to test new ideas, to enhancing the inclusiveness and accessibility of transport infrastructure and mobility services.
These will be further tested and validated in five sites located in Italy, France, Lithuania, and two cities in Switzerland, including Winterthur.
In MOVEO, ZHAW is responsible for transport modelling and data analytics. Carabias-Hütter says work done in the project can help make switching between trains and other transport as seamless as possible.
“We can look at the passenger flow and how they change between buses, trains and maybe also car sharing. There are different mobility modes which come together there,” he says.
As more buildings get built around the station, more access will likely be needed – modelling how passengers move in both the city and station.
Another aspect of the project’s focus on sustainability is inclusivity, being led by the Technical University of Denmark’s department of technology, management and economics.
“We are talking about how to make transport and the information accessible, and how to make it non-discriminatory,” says Csilla Duray, a PhD Student at DTU involved in the project. “We will be collecting experiential data to find pain points across categories such as age, gender and income.“
Examples of such pain points include making sure elevators are easy to find and digital systems that clarify the appropriate ticket and platform. The researchers note that many issues regarding accessibility are as yet unknown.
Duray and colleagues want to explore these pain points through a custom app designed for commuters to document their journey. They can take a picture of any aspect of their trip that they find irritating or disturbing and annotate it to explain their experience. The app has been tested in other contexts, and Duray hopes it will help commuters to amplify poor inclusive design.
”Our goal is to invite as diverse citizens as possible to tell us how they experience the area and then look into how their experiences can be grouped to uncover these different pain points,” she says.
These experiences can then be brought further to planners and decision-makers. The project’s end goal is to have what they call a scalable ‘intelligent framework’, which Carabias-Hütter says may also help make the case for a new underpass for Winterthur and other similar projects throughout Europe.
