Accessibility, behaviour and equity in the E-Bike City

Sub project H

Description

The e-bike-city could and would drastically change the accessibility of the different parts of the city and its hinterland. It would also invite and force the residents to adapt their time tables, daily schedules to the new constraints, especially for those who have chosen car-dependent home-work combinations. This subproject will explore how large the generalized costs of those changes are and how large, if any, the losses in accessibility would be. It would trace these impacts for the different user groups to identify any equity effects which would need to be balanced by further policy interventions and measures.

The equity analysis is crucial as the threats of real or perceived losses are central elements in the mobilization of political resistance. As already the threat of a referendum can stop initiatives in Switzerland, we need to understand who these losers and winners might be. Work in a related project will focus on the qualitative aspects of this.

Enlarged view: Interplay of all sub projects — Interplay of all sub projects

The changes in the daily schedules will be explored with the agent-based framework MATSim, which is based on the optimization of the daily schedules of the agents. The framework already allows the adjustment of departure times, modes and destinations. The project will expand this by the adjustment of the sequence of activities and of their addition and removal.