Private mobility has a high carbon footprint due to the manufacturing, use, parking, and disposal of vehicles. Private cars spend 96% of their time idle and were responsible for 60.7% of total CO2 emissions from road transport. To reduce CO2 emissions, this research proposes the development of the mathematical tools needed to deliver a financially sustainable, car sharing service that nudges private car owners toward adopting shared car usage. This research will design new mathematical models that will allow optimal dynamic pricing of journeys over time and space; thus, will support shared mobility and net-zero goals. These models will combine queuing theory, stochastic dynamic programming, and simulation optimization. They will enable a more competitive pricing of journeys, a higher availability of shared cars, lower council subsidies, and reduced private car usage. They will constitute an exploratory phase of the larger scale aim of designing better demand models that support the financial sustainability of mobility as a service and investigate how these services may operate in (non-) urban contexts. They will be the prelude to the ambitious goal of designing a digital twin for car sharing systems. The increased awareness of climate change and the significant increase in fuel and living costs offer an opportunity to shift the behaviour of private car owners towards shared mobility, making this research timely and relevant. This research will determine key metrics, and a better rich understanding of the state of shared cars across the UK. Through the engagement with stakeholders, it will define the constraints, and differences imposed by rural and urban contexts. This will enhance the feasibility and implementation of proposed solutions, inspire and guide car sharing usage. It will design new mathematical models and numerical solution techniques for pricing using queuing theory and continuous time Markov chains, combined with optimization. An ambitious aim of this proposal is to experiment with frameworks for stochastic dynamic programming and their application to simple examples. A key part of the project will be simulating car share services under different scenarios; allowing us to assess the steady state versus transient behaviour of the optimal solutions of queuing models; and conduct what-if experiments to inform policy and investment scenarios, with the ultimate aim of reaching real-time simulation of services and building a digital twin framework. Finally, it will design a framework for real-time simulation and optimization of car sharing scenarios using a multi-fidelity optimization approach: a low-fidelity Markov chain model to identify a set of good solutions and a high-fidelity simulation model to refine the results. The model will find optimal pricing car-location strategies that maximize profits over a fixed time horizon. Combining these optimization techniques addresses the practical challenge and advances an exciting new interdisciplinary research area for shared cars. The algorithmic approach also has the potential to be adapted to electric and autonomous vehicles in the future. In summary, this project aims to lay the foundation for making car sharing more financially attractive to service providers by developing innovative mathematical models and simulation optimization methods that will allow its financial sustainability. This will offer direct societal benefits to the public and local authorities. If appropriately priced, it will reduce private car usage and local authorities' subsidies of the service. Thus, it will advance mathematical sciences and optimization techniques while it contributes to EPSRC's 4 economic growth and social prosperity outcomes and aligns with EPSRC's Digital Economy theme.

The concept of the 15-minute City (15minC) is critical to fostering transitions to sustainable mobility. However, two main barriers exist to its implementation: first, the 15minC principles are hard to transfer to urban outskirts; second, the lack of attention to the social dimension in the design and implementation of mobility and accessibility solutions. COMMON_ACCESS aims to tackle these shortcomings with two dimensions of novelty. First, central to our approach is the idea of 'Commoning accessibility', which interprets the ability to access facilities and amenities as a common good and recognises it as a social and material resource co-produced by and belonging to all its citizens. Accordingly, the operationalisation of commoning accessibility needs to consider integrally: The provision of facilities and amenities The provision of sustainable options for personal mobility and logistics to access them The social organisation of such services and mobility/logistic options and the role of communities in sharing services, optimising resources and abilities The second novelty stems from the observation that commoning is accepted in academia but has yet to be applied in practice. COMMON_ACCESS seeks instead to focus on the translation into practice of commoning with the study of 'commoning accessibility experiments', such as community-shared (e-) bikes, (e-) cargo bikes; community micro-mobility and Active Travel Hubs; mobile community services; citizen-based dataset community tools to enhance digital connectivity; community parcel lockers; community-led cargo bike deliveries. The overall objective of COMMON_ACCESS is to explore the concept of Commoning accessibility and investigate its operationalisation in the urban periphery and suburban contexts, working closely with local planning authorities, businesses, and communities. This will be realised by fulfilling five key objectives: Objective 1 (O1): Develop and apply methodologies to map and explore (the variety of) accessibility conditions for transport and land use in urban outskirts and beyond. O1 will generate insights on location-specific constraints, opportunities, and conditions for the 15mC in the outskirts. Objective 2 (O2): Develop and apply methodologies to map accessibility interdependencies and identify existing CA experiments in urban outskirts and beyond. O2 will generate insights into the social organisation of mobility/logistic options focusing on the role of communities in sharing services and optimising resources and abilities within urban peripheries. Objective 3 (O3): Understand opportunities for activating and designing new CA (transition) experiments. O3 will provide methods and tools to enhance the potential of communities to implement CA experiments (including financial and governance aspects) Objective 4 (O4): Develop and apply methodologies for estimating the potential impacts of CA (transition) experiments on travel behaviour and access to opportunities Objective 5 (O5): Identifying policy enablers and constraints to commoning accessibility. O5 will generate insights into the key barriers and enablers for up-scaling successful street arrangements, district conditions, and alternative mobility options, including potential strategies for achieving this. By way of testbeds in outskirts neighborhoods of six different metropolitan areas - the Metropolitan area of Amsterdam (NL), the Province of Bergamo (IT), the Province of East-Flanders (BE), the Metropolitan area of Munich (GE), the Province of Pavia (IT) and Oxfordshire County Council (UK)- COMMON_ACCESS will collaborate and exchange knowledge with self-organised communities, SMEs, neighbourhoods, and local authorities in different contexts.

Our Vision is for climate resilient, net zero development of the transport system to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision-makers will have access to (and visualisation of) data that tells them how transport is performing against resilience, decarbonisation, and other objectives, now and in the future. We will deliver them systems models that will help to pinpoint vulnerabilities and quantify the risks of failure. This will enable them to perform 'what-if' analysis of proposed investments and to stress-test scenarios for the major uncertainties that will determine the performance of future transport systems, such as population growth, new materials and technologies and climate change. Our ambition is to deliver co-created research that plots viable pathways and solutions for delivering a resilient, net-zero transport system that works for people and communities by 2050. DARe will be the go-to Hub because we will engage widely and proactively, and provide the evidence, guidance and tools to decision-makers that will enable them to prioritise early interventions and investments. . Our research programme will take a system-of-systems led approach to transport which recognises and addresses the challenges at the three, distinct but critically interlinked, scales of national, regional and local. It will address the interwoven challenges of resilience and net zero, for both existing and new transport infrastructures, and identify and provide solutions for new vulnerabilities that may occur because of the net zero transition, including critical interdependencies with digital and power infrastructures. It will demonstrate the benefits and opportunities that come from reimagining and rethinking how our transport systems deliver mobility to both people and the goods and services our economy relies on, and will offer insight on how governance and policy can enable and drive these changes. We have shaped our research programme in consultation with our multiple civic partners in North East and North West England, Northumberland, Cambridgeshire & Heartland and Scotland as well as our strong cohort of additional partners. DARe will build on this by opening the partnership to all and proactively engage in a programme of co-creation events during the first nine months to jointly define scenarios and storylines leading us towards addressing the dual challenge of decarbonising our local regional and national transport infrastructures whilst increasing their resilience and adaptability in a context of climate change. The role and participation of the wider research community via the DARe Flexible Fund will be instrumental in delivering this. The DARe work programme comprises five integrated work packages (WPs), four focussed research activities plus a management WP. WP1 delivers the co-created transport futures storylines which shape the research activities of the hub and develops the storylines to stress-test solutions across the three spatial scales, contextualised by the systems-of-systems interactions between transport-power-digital critical infrastructures. WP2 provides a new, transferable open-source modelling framework that will be co-developed with and made available to the wider community as a legacy of DARe. WP3 will address the physical implications for infrastructure assets and how their climate-perturbed performance will impact whole-life management. WP4 will provide insights into the wider implications and real-world impacts of the storylines when considering the policy, socio-economic, behavioural and land use planning aspects of the hub. WP0 will be dedicated to hub management, governance and engagement.