Current Projects

Sustainable Urban Mobility Indicators Germany

German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV)

• Rupprecht Consult GmbH,
• Technische Universität Dresden, Chair of Transport Ecology,
• Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik gGmbH,
• VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH

A set of urban mobility indicators to enable standardized assessment of mobility systems across European cities has previously been developed within the EU project “Sustainable Urban Mobility Indicators” – SUMI (2017-2020). In the current project, these indicators will be reviewed and adapted to the German context.

The aim of the project is to develop a broad-based indicator system supported by German municipalities and to provide municipalities with practical guidance on its application.

Against this background, we are creating a comprehensive overview of the objectives and indicator definitions used in strategic transport planning in Germany, analyzing the existing European SUMI indicator set, identifying the need for change, and, with the involvement of municipalities and other relevant stakeholders, developing additional context-specific German sustainable mobility indicators.

Based on the European concept, indicators of sustainable mobility that are already being used in cities and municipalities will be recorded, further developed, and made accessible.

Through this German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV)-funded project, an exchange and dialog with German municipalities will be facilitated, focusing on German perspectives and understandings of sustainability.

Municipal Survey on Mobility
Project on the website of Rupprecht Consult GmbH

PD Dr.-Ing. habil. Rico Wittwer
+49 351 463-34132

Dipl.-Ing. Jonas Krombach
+49 351 463-36598

OpenTrafficCam_live (Open Source Framework for Video Based, Automateted Collection and Analysis of Traffic Data)

Automated object recognition is now standard in many economic sectors, also due to the rapid development of computer technology and machine vision. Road traffic, on the other hand, is often surveyed manually with great effort, which is why suitable data bases are sometimes lacking for research and planning. In a preliminary study, the development of a prototype of the OpenTrafficCam showed that powerful and freely available algorithms can also be made available for traffic experts.

The goal is to further develop tools for data protection-compliant, automated recording and analysis of road traffic movements to market maturity. A new multi-camera system and updated AI algorithms will improve the detection of all vehicle classes as well as pedestrian and bicycle traffic, enabling a variety of common traffic analyses.

In the project software and hardware of the system developed in the previous feasibility study are optimised, data protection concepts are developed, the open-source camera system is modularised and made online-capable, and image data sets are annotated, with which own AI models are trained, implemented and published. In cooperation with traffic software developers, engineering consultancies, cities and federal institutions, OpenTrafficCam is being tailored to practical applications in the transport sector.

Project on ministry website
Source code
Project website with further information and software documentation

Dipl.-Ing. Martin Bärwolff
+49 (0)351 463-36661

Dipl.-Ing. Hendrik Görner
+49 (0)351 463-36503

Dipl.-Ing. Armin Kollascheck
+49 (0)351 463 36501

• University of Stuttgart, Chair of Transport Planning and Traffic Management Technology
• BSV Büro für Stadt- und Verkehrsplanung Dr.-Ing. Reinhold Baier GmbH

The goal of the project is the development of a consistent and transferable method for designing transport networks within built-up areas for cars, road-based PT, cyclists, and pedestrians, which integrates the requirements of network design and road space planning.

The first step is a literature analysis to outline the national and international status of road network design, based on which the requirements of urban transport networks are systemized.

To enable statements on the possibilities and limitations of the current ‘Guidelines for Integrated Network Design’ (RIN) method, the RIN method is to be applied to urban transport networks and the results are to be discussed with planners. The analysis of the application of RIN then is the basis for developing a suitable method for designing transport networks in built-up areas. Herein, a mode-specific and a mode-comprehensive approach are combined.

The results are to be adapted for the utilization in the rulebook of the Road and Transportation Research Association (FGSV), to demonstrate options for planners and to give indications on the functional structure and on the design options of network sections in built-up areas.

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Regine Gerike
+49 351 463-36501

M.Sc. Caroline Koszowski
+49 (0)351 463 353 33

11/2021 to 02/2024

The goal of this research project is to identify the design characteristics of Protected Intersections, to analyse their impact on traffic safety, perceived safety and the behaviour at Protected Intersections and to compare them to conventional intersections. From this, recommendations can be derived on safe design and operational conditions, which will contribute to the technical rulebook.

As a first step, international findings and rulebooks are analysed and design characteristics of Protected Intersections are identified. Furthermore, Protected Intersections in the Netherlands are examined and compared with conventional intersections in the Netherlands as well as with intersections in Germany which share certain design characteristics with Protected Intersections. The focus of this examination is placed on cyclists, while also including the needs of other road users (pedestrians, drivers, service operators, etc.).

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Regine Gerike
+49 351 463-36501

Dipl.-Ing. Bettina Schröter
+49 (0)351 463 366 99

In the project, a database of safety-relevant traffic, infrastructure and operational characteristics of the road network that can be used as safety indicators will be created. Through interviews and workshops with experts, but also by analysing extensive data on known safety-relevant features of road infrastructure and operation from previous research projects, one or more safety indicators will be selected for a Germany-wide safety monitoring. These will also serve to develop a methodology for network segmentation, sampling and aggregation into a higher-level safety indicator. Finally, the developed concept will be tested on a part of the German road network.

Urban accidents between pedestrians and cyclists

German Insurers Accident Research (UDV)

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The aim of the study is to quantify the occurrence of accidents between pedestrians and cyclists, to describe the circumstances and the behaviour that endangers safety. In addition, these accidents are to be localised and correlations with the traffic infrastructure analysed. As a result, typical conflict situations will be identified and countermeasures as well as general recommendations for the prevention of pedestrian-cyclist accidents will be developed.

In the project, macroscopic and microscopic analyses of the accident occurrence are carried out, which are also compared with the infrastructure characteristics. Video-based observations of traffic behaviour will be made at selected locations. In addition, the needs of road users are to be taken into account through short surveys.

TEMPUS (Test Field Munich: Pilot Test Urban Automated Road Traffic)

Sub-project "Traffic Culture
(Social acceptance, communication and interaction processes)

City of Munich
3D Mapping Solutions GmbH
BMW Group
EBUSCO Germany GmbH
Bavarian State Construction Directorate
Institute for Information Processing Technology at KIT
PTV Planung Transport Verkehr AG
Siemens Mobility GmbH
Munich Public Utility Company
Traffic Consultants GmbH: Trafficon
TTS Europe GmbH
Chair of Traffic Engineering at the TU Munich
United Parcel Service: UPS
Chair of Traffic Psychology at the TU Dresden

Project on the pages of the Chair of Traffic Psychology
Pressemitteilung der TU Dresden

Dipl.-Ing. Martin Bärwolff
+49 (0)351 463-36661

Dipl.-Ing. Marie Keller
+49 (0)351 463 42394

Dipl.-Ing. Hendrik Görner
+49 (0)351 463-36503

LBS2ITS: Curricula Enrichment delivered through the Application of Location-based Services to Intelligent Transport Systems / LBS2ITS

European Union – Erasmus+ : Capacity Building in Higher Education

• Department for Geodesy and Geoinformation Research Divisions Engineering Geodesy and Cartography, TU Vienna
• Department of Topograhy Athens Greece, School of Rural and Surveying Engineering, National Technical University of Athens
• Faculty of Geomatics, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka
• Department of Town & Country Planning and Department of Civil Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
• Faculty of Technology, University of Sri Jayawardhanapura, Sri Lanka
• Faculty of Computing, General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka faces many transportation challenges. Constraints such as timely access to modern technology and the lack of appropriately trained personnel have contributed to increasing social, economic and environmental concerns around road safety, pollution and transport inefficiencies. The project will address these issues through enrichment of the university curricula. Specifically, the integration of Location-based Services (LBS) into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).

LBS deliver information based on the location of objects. Smart transportation is therefore an ideal LBS application since it is based on locating people (e.g. using smartphones) and objects (e.g. cars, trains, etc.). As LBS evolve rapidly, there is an increasing need to train the next generation of skilled professionals who can leverage these new capabilities. This is important for Sri Lanka, where population growth and resource constraints demand the urgent use of emerging technologies to secure the safety and sustainability of their society. This level of education is in its infancy and cannot rapidly deliver the knowledge inputs required to change transport management decision-making.

LBS2ITS is based on a consortium of three EU and four Sri Lankan Universities. It will build a fully immersive and integrated teaching and learning experience. The outcome will be a digital learning environment supporting synthetic and real-world learning experiences encouraging self-paced learning modules for both teacher and students. It will contain digital resource kits for interaction with modern equipment, continuous assessment and two-way feedback. Webinars and virtual experiences will underpin real-world Problem-based Learning (PBL) scenarios. A key novelty will be inclusion of industry representatives and external experts in the advisory groups. These will support our dissemination and quality control initiatives, the relevance of the PBL and student learning outcomes. Mentorship and a focus on cultural awareness, gender equity and social parity will govern our principles for curricula enrichment.

Website: LBS2ITS

Prof. Regine Gerike
+49 351 463-36501

• Rhine/Main Regional Transport Association (RMV)
• Bavarian Ministry of Housing, Building and Transport (StMB)
• infas Institute for Applied Social Science
• Rhine/Main Regional Transport Service Company

The goals of the Kompass project are to develop evidence-based options for sustainable mobility by using a unique MiD/SrV database which has for the first time been harmonized and completed with external variables, in order to achieve better availability of mobility especially for economically marginalized groups.

The following results are expected:

• Durable and enriched time series that describe and explain mobility behaviour based on data from MiD/SrV surveys,
• Impact models of mobility behaviour in the Rhine-Main area and a region in the Free State of Bavaria which include determinants of mobility far beyond mobility data including societal conditions as well as an application tool that can be used for scenario planning,
• Scenarios for strengthening sustainable mobility tailored to the two examined regions, developed in future labs by using data analysis,
• Impact analyses for the scenarios are created by using the impact models implemented in the application tool and further undergo qualitative testing in the future labs,
• specific recommendations are made on strategies and measures for designing sustainable urban mobility.

Changing the transport system is something that is discussed a lot, with hopes of achieving sustainable everyday traffic. However, the debate often gets lost in partial solutions or settles on single elements like cycling, car sharing or new types of mobility. A lot of the time, already available suitable data is misregarded or not processed in an integral and practice-oriented way. Additionally, mobility is too often viewed as detached from its causes. Also, the current situation with the pandemic shows how events that break with trends have an enormous effect on the mobility behaviour in people's everyday lives, which can also have long-term effects. These are the deficits which are addressed within the Kompass project, it also enables an extensive analysis and brings research and practice closer together. The central research question is about the strategic orientation of mobility measures in regional-specific future labs for selected target groups, which in data analyses have proven to be especially promising in terms of their potential for behavioural changes, or are especially relevant because of their group size or are believed to be especially vulnerable in terms of potential exclusion from mobility.

The TU Dresden is the institution responsable for Mobility in Cities - SrV and infas as well as it is the three-time contractor for Mobility in Germany (MiD) and therefore it has extensive methodical and factual knowledge on the data stocks. These are to be longitudinally re-harmonised, collected and evaluated. Based on this, a content analysis will provide a time series, data on environmental factors and it will be the starting point for different scenarios and recommendations for action. This approach is expanded with laboratory-specific impact models which include traffic-external impact factors and thus make visible which changes in transport are supply-induced and which ones are influenced by other factors. The results are to be reflected and further developed in future labs with two practice partners. The practice partners are the Rhine/Main Regional Transport Association (RMV) with the urban space Frankfurt/Rhine-Main and the Bavarian Ministry of Housing, Building and Transport.

Webseite: Zukunft nachhaltige Mobilität

The goal of the NaMAV project are:

• to elaborate deployment scenarios for highly and fully automated vehicles (levels 4 and 5) on the example of the City of Leipzig,
• to rate these scenarios in terms of their occurence probability as well as their effects on the goals of strategic urban and traffic development planning, especially on the pronounced sustainability criteria,
• to derive recommendations for specific steps for the preparation of implementing measures within chosen scenarios including the planning of milestones, communication and participation and
• to evaluate the transferability of the findings and established scenarios to other urban spaces and contexts and to formulate generalisable recommendations.

The starting point of the project Sustainable Mobility and Urban Quality through Transport Automatisation (NaMAV) is the hypothesis that automated vehicles of the leves four and five will become present in urban space, that they come with considerable opportunities as well as risks and that urban and transport planning should prepare for such scenarios of transport automatization and actively shape them. The NaMAV project works with the City of Leipzig as an active practice partner to develop concepts for an anticipatory utilisation of possible opportunities as well as the minimisation of risks of future traffic systems with a higher rate of automatization.

In order to reach these goals, NaMAV develops deployment scenarios for highly and fully automated vehicles on the example of the city of Leipzig. The effects of selected scenarios are then modelled with the transport simulation software MATSim (TU Berlin) and evaluated on their effects on sustainable mobility. Hence, recommendations for the City of Leipzig and other local authorities are derived and finally, the findings are used to formulate generalisable recommendations on how to transfer the findings to other cities and municipalities in Germany. 

As a result of the project, customized deployment scenarios of automatized traffic are made available to the City of Leipzig; these will be evaluated on their effect on promoting sustainable urban mobility in the target year 2050. Specific steps and recommendations on the implementation will be derived. The MATSim traffic model of the City of Leipzig as well as the model configurations and adaptations for the use of autonomous vehicles will be made available on a public server after the project so that they can be used and further developed for free by the city of Leipzig and others. Within the NaMAV project, generalisable recommendations on sustainable urban mobility are established which will be deployed in Leipzig; additionally they will also help facilitate the acces to mobility, reduce motorised traffic and mitigate negative effects on the environment.

NaMAV Project Page
Website: Zukunft nachhaltige Mobilität (in German)

Prof. Regine Gerike
+49 351 463-36501

platomo GmbH
BSV Büro für Stadt- und Verkehrsplanung Dr.-Ing. Reinhold Baier GmbH

The aim of the project is to derive extrapolation factors that can be used to calculate daily volumes (e.g. for traffic planning or research projects) from short-term counts (cross-sectional counts).

The project will also examine – and if possible develop a methodology – to improve the extrapolation by including environmental data (e.g. location of the counting point, extent of development and type of use in the surrounding area).

These results should ultimately enable the inclusion of pedestrian traffic volumes in municipal planning projects and in research projects with lower personnel and budget.

Furthermore, they should be incorporated into the regulations of the Road and Transportation Research Association (FGSV) – e.g. the recommendations for traffic surveys (EVE).

Data on travel volume, often in the form of cross-sectional counts, is a central component of planning processes; it is used to dimension traffic facilities and to weigh up the interests of the different user groups of the traffic zone. Research projects and road safety work also require data on the travel volume of the various traffic modes, e.g. for evaluating measures or as exposure variables in the assessment of road safety (calculation of accident rates, etc.).

While this data is generally widely available for motor vehicle traffic (from automatic permanent counting stations supplemented by a large number of coordinated manual short-term counts) and is increasingly being taken into account for bicycle traffic, e.g. through permanent counting stations and smartphone-based surveys, there are no established methods for pedestrian traffic other than manual traffic counts. For example, it is difficult to motivate pedestrians (unlike cyclists) to actively track their trips, and mobile phone data collected automatically via radio cells can usually only be used for longer trips or vehicle traffic due to the coarse spatial resolution of this data. Due to the high personnel and therefore financial costs involved in manual counting, data on pedestrian traffic volumes has therefore only rarely been collected to date.

Contact
Person(s)

• FSD Fahrzeugsystemdaten GmbH, Dresden/Radeberg
• Dresden University of Technology, Chair of Automobile Engineering (LKT)
• City of Hoyerswerda