Etude de la mobilité urbaine en Belgique et proposition de pistes d'amélioration pour une réduction de la congestion.

Abstract

The urban mobility is at its tipping point. The traditional mobility, mainly composed of cars, is not sustainable anymore. As seen in the United States and in Europe, congestion becomes more and more frequent in large cities leading to large losses in time and money. Only in the US, congestion costs more than $120 billion annually. The OECD states the congestion costs between 1 and 2% of a country’s GDP—corresponding to a total loss between 4 and 8 billion euros for Belgium. Firstly, this work studies Belgian mobility from 2005 to 2014 in order to determine (un)successful transportation patterns : where does the congestion lay? Where can it be improved ? It turns out large cities are less and less cars’ playing field where collaborative (new) transportation means are taking more and more transport shares. Indeed, biking is growing by 147% in Brussels whereas the car plummets by 16%. Indeed, Belgian spent a bit less than a month (in cumulated hours) in congested roads during the last six months. Secondly, we propose a new vision of our mobility to answer the aforementioned question : how can the mobility be improved in the future? As cars remain our preferred transportation mode, collaborative carsharing and future autonomous drive will decrease the total bill. Our analysis suggests 80% reduction from the actual cost of 0,75€/km down to the optimal autonomous shared car cost of 0,15€/km. As future car are not available yet, other approaches are considered and estimations of their impacts on the actual mobility are conducted. We considered bike commuting, carsharing, carpooling and on-demand services. Theses alternatives offers great opportunities to reduce congestion costs and wasted hours. They are becoming more and more popular (again) thanks to their integration with mobile technologies vanishing the main encountered constraints (e.g. people matching, minute-paid use, etc.). Finally, a (technological) analysis and framework are proposed to envision the smart mobility transition by incorporating a dynamical priced connected urban infrastructure centered on the commuter’s needs.