‘SUMP-PLUS’ is a three-year RIA, designed to address urban mobility related challenges and to exploit new opportunities, by developing a strong, rigorous evidence base through a co-created City Laboratories approach (to be demonstrated in different EU cities) building on the strengths of the existing SUMPs and SULPs. SUMP-PLUS will develop and apply transition pathways towards more sustainable cities taking into account the need to establish stronger links with other urban system components. It has 4 primary policy objectives: 1. To develop and apply a set of context-specific mobility transformation pathways that will enable cities to map out a practical implementation pathway. 2. To demonstrate how cities can develop stronger links with other urban system components (education, health, retail, land use planning, etc.) - while taking into account disruptive technological and contextual developments - so that urban mobility and accessibility can be delivered more comprehensively, efficiently and effectively. 3. To identify new solutions that will increase efficiency and sustainability, in both the freight and passenger sectors. 4. To identify and demonstrate new partnerships and business models that enable various mobility objectives to be met cost-effectively through appropriate public/private sector partnerships These objectives will be met and demonstrated through a programme of trials and comprehensive evaluation, in six co-created City Laboratories. This requires achieving 4 operational objectives: developing appropriate urban governance arrangements and advanced analytics; extensive stakeholder engagement and co-creation of outputs; producing enhanced SUMP-PLUS guidance matching the different needs and maximising impact through a targeted range of dissemination, capacity building, knowledge transfer and legacy exploitation activities.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 highlighted the need for urgent, transformative change, on an unprecedented scale, if global warming is to be restricted to 1.5C. The challenge of reaching an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 represents a huge technological, engineering, policy and societal challenge for the next 30 years. This is a huge challenge for the transport sector, which accounts for over a quarter of UK domestic greenhouse gas emissions and has a flat emissions profile over recent years. The DecarboN8 project will develop a new network of researchers, working closely with industry and government, capable of designing solutions which can be deployed rapidly and at scale. It will develop answers to questions such as: 1) How can different places be rapidly switched to electromobility for personal travel? How do decisions on the private fleet interact with the quite different decarbonisation strategies for heavy vehicles? This requires integrating understanding of the changing carbon impacts of these options with knowledge on how energy systems work and are regulated with the operational realities of transport systems and their regulatory environment; and 2) What is the right balance between infrastructure expansion, intelligent system management and demand management? Will the embodied carbon emissions of major new infrastructure offset gains from improved flows and could these be delivered in other ways through technology? If so, how quickly could this happen, what are the societal implications and how will this impact on the resilience of our systems? The answer to these questions is unlikely to the same everywhere in the UK but little attention is paid to where the answers might be different and why. Coupled with boundaries between local government areas, transport network providers (road and rail in particular) and service operators there is potential for a lack of joined up approaches and stranded investments in ineffective technologies. The DecarboN8 network is led by the eight most research intensive Universities across the North of England (Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) who will work with local, regional and national stakeholders to create an integrated test and research environment across the North in which national and international researchers can study the decarbonisation challenge at these different scales. The DecarboN8 network is organised across four integrated research themes (carbon pathways, social acceptance and societal readiness, future transport fuels and fuelling, digitisation, demand and infrastructure). These themes form the structure for a series of twelve research workshops which will bring new research interests together to better understand the specific challenges of the transport sector and then to work together on integrating solutions. The approach will incorporate throughout an emphasis on working with real world problems in 'places' to develop knowledge which is situated in a range of contexts. £400k of research funding will be available for the development of new collaborations, particularly for early career researchers. We will distribute this in a fair, open and transparent manner to promote excellent research. The network will help develop a more integrated environment for the development, testing and rapid deployment of solutions through activities including identifying and classifying data sources, holding innovation translation events, policy discussion forums and major events to highlight the opportunities and innovations. The research will involve industry and government stakeholders and citizens throughout to ensure the research outcomes meet the ambitions of the network of accelerating the rapid decarbonisation of transport.

Following recent mega-trends in the mobile and sharing economy and thanks to the latest ITS developments, “Mobility as a Service” is conceived as the way people will move themselves and their goods in the future. The “as a service” paradigm can be a real revolution when it is able to ensure higher continuity among the different means of transport, and enable offering combined mobility packages as a viable alternative to fragmented mobility and car ownership. Though some MaaS initiatives have already been tested in Europe, they encountered several obstacles in reaching scale and stable business operation. IMOVE will learn from such initiatives as UBIGO in Gothenburg or Hannovermobil, launched a decade ago in Hannover, and will step forward contributing to radically change mobility paradigms bringing in disruptive elements of mobility services. Innovative business and technology enablers will be investigated able to concretely put into action, accelerate and scale up the MaaS market deployment in Europe, ultimately paving the way for a “roaming” capability for MaaS users at the European level. IMOVE research and innovation action is based on investigation, development and validation of bottom up novel solutions able to define sound MaaS business models, smoothing their efficient and profitable service operation. A suite of ITS elements empowering MaaS schemes will be delivered by IMOVE, including technology components for real-time collection of fine-grained data on mobility user needs, habits and preferences as well as components enabling the exchange of information and enhancing seamless interoperability among different MaaS subsystems and multiple MaaS schemes. IMOVE solutions will be investigated and validated in 5 European Living Labs, currently engaged in or having plans for MaaS development. The participation of UITP will ensure active participation of PTAs as well as key private stakeholders from other sites and will further guarantee a multiplier effect.

The University of Hertfordshire and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science currently operate an Air Quality forecasting system. Like a weather forecast, the system uses a computer model to make predictions of the concentrations of air pollutants such as Ozone, Particulate Matter and Nitrogen Oxides. The forecast runs for the whole of the UK and predicts three days into the future and it produces maps of each pollutant at a spatial resolution of 10km. Alongside the Air Quality Forecasting capability the University of Hertfordshire has also developed models and expertise in modelling air quality in urban areas. Air Quality can be highly influenced by the regional and national scale effects predicted by the Air Quality forecast but it is also influenced by very local effects such as emissions from traffic on a particular road, the local weather and even the local buildings and landscape. For this reason we have a separate system for urban areas which operates at a very high resolution. The urban system uses data that describes the pollution from individual roads for example. This urban model also has data to describe where people live and work so we can calculate pollutant concentrations in different parts of a city and at different times of day, then use that information to estimate the 'exposure' to pollution faced by the local population where they live and work. Because 'exposure' combines both pollutant levels and the time people spend in polluted areas, it is allows us to understand the likely health impact air pollution is having on the population. In this project we will forecast air quality and exposure for two urban areas, Greater Manchester and Bristol. The unique innovations in the project are to bring air quality and exposure forecasts down to the street and city scales, whilst making all the data available to the local authorities for the first time. To do this we will continue to operate the UK Air Quality Forecast and feed its predictions into the urban scale model. This will allow us to create pollution maps, a three day forecast and exposure estimates at a local scale for Bristol and Greater Manchester. The data will allow the local authorities to study air quality trends and statistics and find low pollution routes for cyclists and pedestrians. They will be able to use the data to make better planning decisions, improve education schemes and optimise pollution reduction measures to have the greatest impact. The delivery of exposure data alongside pollution concentrations is especially important for maximising the effectiveness of strategies to improve health. We will make all of the model data available to the local authorities by creating an online data dashboard. This will allow the local authorities access to all the model data via an easy to use graphical user interface. By creating the data dashboard we will remove a barrier currently preventing wider exploitation of air quality model data and unlock the potential benefits of modeled air quality data to local authorities and the general public. This project will directly address the needs of Local Authorities to meet their statutory responsibility to monitor and manage Air Quality. The responsibility for meeting EU air quality limit values is devolved to them. Our Local Authority partners, Bristol and Greater Manchester, attribute the premature death of approximately 200 and 1300 people annually to Air Quality respectively. This project will help the Bristol and Greater Manchester authorities by underpinning and informing their strategies for improving health and reducing air pollution with new, unique datasets. This data will allow the Local Authorities to optimally implement new and exiting initiatives such as promoting cycling, walking and public transport, managing goods vehicle, traffic management, low emission zones, planning guidance and education and informing the public of Air Quality health risks.

There is an accepted need to promote step changes towards more sustainable urban environments, notably in transport and travel, which we will focus on. While many model-based desk-studies have aimed to simulate such environments as part of a decision support tool, they adopt many unvalidated, hypothetical assumptions, particularly in the way that major transport focused interventions might impact on both behaviour and the effectiveness of the infrastructure. There is very little real evidence of what works and what can be used to promote such changes, deriving from either the physical nature and make-up of urban environments and in the way that people choose to act and behave. This 5 year proposal will build on the momentum of major EPSRC- and ESRC-supported activity at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester in order to fill this evidence gap, providing an empirically grounded frame for the modelling of transformational futures.The project seeks to produce a step change in current knowledge and practice using a mix of new data sources, methodological innovation in analysis of this diverse data, development of new planning practices and procedures and supporting modelling tools. To this end it will develop visions of urban futures of 2050 which are both resilient to external change and sustainable. The knowledge and procedures developed as part of this project will provide a foundation upon which planners and others involved in decision-making in relation to urban transport, at both local and national levels, can start to put in place the necessary changes to achieve the resilient and sustainable visions of 2050.The proposed research is ambitious and novel. We will undertake the first largely qualitative longitudinal panel study of households which focuses on their transport activity, in particular delving into questions of why they do certain things and how change might be brought about. This work will be complemented by study of historical information over longer periods of time, making use of available information from a variety of transport and non-transport databases, coupled with testimony from planners and others in two study areas who have experienced changes first hand. The task of bringing these diverse data sources together will be innovative and seek to effectively explore ways of integrating these materials in a number of different ways which recognise the complexity of decisions and practices around transport and allow us to draw some understanding of why step changes occur. We will use the results of these analyses to feed into more theoretical work which will consider firstly the potential for new planning procedures and practice and secondly new modelling tools which provide the means to help achieve the step changes necessary in transport for sustainable and resilient urban futures by 2050.