Transition pathways for the transport sector – a case-study for the City of Stuttgart

For the city of Stuttgart, two distinct visions have been created that are broadly in line with the common ICARUS pathways “Smart Tech City” and “Sharing Smart Communities”. The overall goal is the same for both visions and can be described as optimized welfare and wellbeing with lower pressures to the environment. In the following both visions are presented. A more detailed description of the two visions and a general description of the foreseen transition pathways can be found in the project deliverable D6.31. This report focuses on the transport sector, for which two distinct scenarios (one for each foreseen vision) are compared to a baseline scenario representing the business as usual. The foreseen visions implicate a change in mode choice alternatives. With fully automatic vehicles becoming available, behavioral changes can be expected. With the help of the macroscopic travel demand model of the Stuttgart Region, it is possible to study and evaluate potential implications for the transport sector, which arise from individual decisions and behavioral choices. The simulation of travel demand patterns helps to identify relevant preconditions which are required for a successful transition in the transport sector and to ensure that the foreseen visions are actually feasible. Results showed that the introduction of fully automated shared vehicle fleets for car-sharing or ridesharing is suitable to decrease the number of vehicles needed. This assumes that private car ownership is prohibited, as it is the case in the vision scenarios. Although the vision scenarios do not necessarily improve the traffic situation within the city boundaries, they show the importance of pricing and the relevance of a dense public transport supply. For both scenarios, it was not possible to run the system without adding rail-bound public transport (light rail transit, suburban and regional trains). Thus, apart from a certain share of pedestrians and cyclists, transport always consisted of a mixture of rail-bound public transport and autonomously driving taxis (carsharing in “Smart Tech Cities) or minibuses (ridesharing in “Sharing Smart Communities”). In practice, a mixture of both scenarios would most likely be realized