Transport

How people and goods get around our cities is undergoing considerable change. As new mobility options are introduced, cities and communities are trying to lower emissions, improve safety and increase affordability and accessibility of transport networks. Cities, mobility partners, and communities are taking a systems perspective to rethink the movement of people and goods. Developed by the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Mobility, the Guidelines for City Mobility: Steering towards collaboration reflect shared goals for liveable and just transport networks and cities. This document provides eight practical guidelines – from data-sharing to multimodal integration – that help establish, develop and strengthen partnerships between cities and mobility partners. These guidelines are intended to serve as a blueprint for collaborations, including existing, new and future partnerships. Each guideline is intended to complement the operating authority of cities with the creativity and innovation of the private sector. It is our hope that cities and mobility partners around the world will deploy these guidelines in their work. We invite cities and mobility partners to confirm the guidelines that resonate for their context, adapt them as necessary and apply them consistently with all stakeholders.

Pedal power is becoming the transport mode of choice for urban dwellers around the globe. Bicycles offer a means of travel that allows people to get to their destination quickly and cheaply, especially in large cities with congested roads. With worldwide sales of bike sharing services forecast to increase to EUR 8 billion by 2021, a veritable race for global supremacy has already begun. Rapid growth, especially in Asia, is fueled by the continued strong demand for cost-effective mobility, largely unregulated market access and massive investment. Private providers have recently mobilized more than USD 3 billion in venture capital to expand not just in China, but globally. Asian market leaders ofo and Mobike (each with 200 million registered users), which, unlike European providers, operate free-floating instead of station-based systems, have been pushing the European market since 2017. The study shows that the bike-sharing market is benefiting from rising global environmental awareness and the common sharing trend, as people are more willing to pay for mobility than for owning a car or a bicycle. In addition, cycling is cheaper than a taxi, ride-hailing or an own car, and more flexible than public transport systems. Because the use of a rental bike can also be easily combined with other means of transport, bike sharing will become an important pillar in a growing urban ecosystem of sharing (car, bicycle, ride-sharing) and mobility services (platforms, apps, aggregators).Despite the promising opportunities offered by the burgeoning bike-sharing market, the rapid pace of growth is not without its pitfalls. Operators are faced with becoming the target of vandalism, or oversupply in certain cities. We predict the market will consolidate in the coming years, with a smaller number of high quality offerings surviving the initial boom to find longer term success.

The innovative power of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, lies in the way in which objects are designed and produced. The variety of processes used means that applications can be developed for industry – such as the creation of equipment or intermediate products – as well as for consumers. The technology, which has had several decades to mature, is making leaps and bounds, and has the potential to be deployed on a much wider scale in the future.

An in-depth review examines the various parts of the market, including the different stakeholders involved, the users (manufacturers and the general public) as well as the various ecosystems that create synergy between the various initiatives. It highlights the potential of additive manufacturing, in terms of boosting the competitiveness of French companies and creating opportunities in France's regions.

The review also includes four possible scenarios that show how the market could develop, and lists the roadblocks and drivers that influence each one. They are entitled "prototyping and experimentation", "scale-up of customisation", "mass production and performance improvements" and "shifts in the value chain". The goal of the resulting recommendations is to improve the conditions for providing support for stakeholders so that additive manufacturing can reach its full potential.

The methods used, the results obtained and the recommendations are the sole responsibility of the authors of the study.

What might the future of mobility be in China in 2030? Mobility is defined as the ability to travel from one location to another, regardless of mode or purpose. RAND researchers, working with the Institute for Mobility Research, used a six-step process to develop two scenarios that address this question. The six steps are (1) select influencing areas (domains that affect mobility directly: demographics, economics, energy, and transportation supply and constraints); (2) elicit projections on descriptors (via expert workshops in Washington, D.C., and Beijing); (3) integrate these into scenario frameworks (using two analysis methods and a computer-based tool); (4) produce scenario narratives (based on the clusters produced by the tool); (5) draw qualitative consequences for future mobility; and (6) create a wild-card scenario (by looking at events that might disrupt trends).

Three key drivers differentiate the resulting scenarios: economic growth, the presence of constraints on vehicle ownership and driving, and environmental conditions. In scenario 1, the Great Reset, continued (albeit slightly slower than previous) economic growth fuels demand for automobiles, including hybrids, but cities also invest heavily in transit and nonmotorized infrastructure. Scenario 2, Slowing but Growing, assumes that the economy goes through a downturn marked by instability and that future growth in travel demand is lower than in the first scenario. By making potential long-term mobility futures more vivid, the aim is to help decisionmakers at different levels of government and in the private sector better anticipate and prepare for change.

Connectivity is the high-level framework toward which many APEC work streams will focus their efforts. The Blueprint is a strategic guide for current and future initiatives that will bring the APEC region closer together to strengthen economic integration. Connectivity is an ambitious target for a diverse regional organization such as APEC, but it is precisely that ambition that will drive strong and tangible achievements. Connectivity will be important not only for governments and businesses, but also for the APEC community as a whole. By connecting APEC’s developed and emerging growth centers, the region’s quality of growth will improve, contributing to the Asia-Pacific’s economic prosperity and resilience.
The Blueprint contains existing connectivity-related initiatives, encourages reviving those initiatives that require further progress, and proposes creating future initiatives to lead APEC progress. The Blueprint is also broad in scope and adaptable to the ever-changing conditions in the Asia-Pacific.

Global urban populations are growing rapidly – and with them, city transport volumes. Urban transport energy consumption is expected to double by 2050, despite ongoing vehicle technology and fuel-economy improvements. Annual global urban transport emissions are expected to more than double to nearly 1 billion annual tonnes of CO2 eq. by 2025. 90% of this growth in urban transport emissions is expected to come from private motorised travel.

The effects of growing travel demand and increasing shifts to private motorisation are leading to escalating roadway congestion that costs billions of dollars in wasted fuel and time. Moreover, motorised vehicle traffic has significant adverse effects on health, contributing substantially to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases from outdoor air pollution, and deteriorated safety in cities, leading to more than 1.3 million deaths per year from traffic accidents. Urgent policy attention to improve the energy efficiency of urban transport systems is thus needed not only for energy security reasons, but also to mitigate the negative climate, noise, air pollution, congestion and economic impacts of rising urban transport volumes and energy consumption.

This policy pathway highlights the holistic transport energy efficiency, city planning and traffic management approaches local and national leaders in Belgrade, New York City, Seoul and more than 30 other cities across Asia, Europe and the Americas are aggressively pursuing. Drawing on these “real-life” case studies, this pathway offers national and local decision makers concrete steps on how to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate key urban transport system policies in order to improve not only energy security, but also quality of life.

This study brings together work in progress on a long-term project to identify and analyse the 'cost of non-Europe' in a number of policy fields. This concept, first pioneered by the European Parliament in the 1980s, is used here to quantify the potential efficiency gains in today's European economy from pursuing a series of policy initiatives recently advocated by Parliament - from a wider and deeper digital single market to better coordinated national and European policies for defence and development. The benefits may be measured principally in additional GDP generated or a more rational use of public resources. The latest analysis suggests that the European economy could be boosted by almost 1.6 trillion euro per year - or 12 per cent of EU-28 GDP (2014) - by such measures over time. The study is intended as a contribution to the on-going discussion about the European Union’s policy priorities over the current five-year institutional cycle, from 2014 to 2019.