Urban Mobility Certificates (UMCs) : Informing mobility choices, carbon emissions and energy use from transportation

Urban transportation today consumes scarce resources of fossil fuels and it is a majorcause for environmental damage and accelerating climate change. To achieve sustainablemobility in the cities, it is necessary to improve energy efficiency and lower carbonemissions through the promotion of walking, cycling and especially public transportation.The urban form is a great obstacle in achieving sustainable mobility. Many Swedishcities were designed for the private automobile and they lack possibilities to walk, cycle anduse public transportation. To address this problem, this project developed and testedUrban Mobility Certificates (UMCs) or transportdeklaration in Swedish. The UMCsvisually inform sustainable mobility as integration with walking, cycling and publictransportation, estimate modal shares, transportation energy use in kWh/year/person andcarbon emission in t CO2/year/person. Visualizing this information has a potential totrigger a virtuous cycle of transforming neighborhoods, catalyzing sustainabledevelopment to better integrate walking, cycling and public transportation in Swedishneighborhoods.The UMCs produce reasonable results with acceptable errors that are common for thiskind of trip generation models. The can be used to identify unsustainable mobility inexisting neighborhoods and new developments. The UMCs directly inform sustainablemobility in a very concise form (integration, modal shares, transportation energy use inkWh/year/person and carbon emission in t CO2/year/person) and show a complex set ofurban form and accessibility factors as background for the modal shares forecasts. Bothconcise and complex information is needed to illuminate the complex link between urbanform and sustainable mobility. In addition, the methodology can be used to analyzealternative scenarios to redesign sprawling Swedish neighborhoods into more sustainableurban forms. Scenarios like mixed development, introduction of public transportation orcreating a network of walkable streets (called promenadstad in Swedish) can decreasetransportation energy use by 1000 kWh/year/person to 3000 kWh/year/person(extensions of historical urban centers) or halve the Swedish average of 6000kWh/year/person. It is very important to use the UMCs in the earliest stage of the urbanplanning and development process.Sustainable mobility is possible only if there are choices to walk, cycle and use publictransportation. To help in redesigning and redeveloping the Swedish neighborhoods thatare oriented to the automobile, this project furthermore presented a model of small andlarge Swedish city with typical neighborhoods. The application of the UMCs in Swedishplanning and development processes must be understood as a process of informing aboutlack of mobility choices and urban interventions such as introduction of walkable streets,cycling and public transportation infrastructures, mix of functions and Transit OrientedDevelopment (TOD) in typical Swedish neighborhoods