Project MOTUS - sustainable transport despite Corona, climate change or structural disruptions?

Is resilient and sustainable transport possible in the future despite the challenges posed by pandemics, climate change and other structural disruptions? The MOTUS research project is dedicated to this question. Over a duration of three years, it will investigate what measures municipalities can take to make their urban transport system sustainable and resilient even when disruptive events occur.

At the end of the project, a simulation platform will be developed that enables municipal decision-makers to play out various disruptive scenarios for their transport system and derive suitable countermeasures. This supports a holistic understanding of municpal transport systems - a pre-condition for a targeted contribution to the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, in particular the demand for safe, resilient and sustainable cities. MOTUS is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) as part of the mFUND innovation initiative with a total of around 800,000 euros.

Interdisciplinary consortium reflects the diversity of transport modes

MOTUS is a joint research project by the Technische Universität Dresden and the University of Kassel, two research-intensive institutions with a total of four professorships involved: the Chair of Traffic Control and Process Automation, the Chair of Transport Ecology and the Chair of Automobile Engineering at the "Friedrich List" Faculty of Transport Sciences at Technische Universität Dresden and the Chair of Cycling and Local Mobility at the University of Kassel. The interdisciplinary project consortium is complemented by the SME "Teralytics", which already carried out extensive and meaningful evaluations of mobile phone data for the Robert Koch Institute during the Corona pandemic.

Disruptive events change behaviour

Corona is demonstrably turning everyday life and thus the mobility behaviour of many people upside down: Familiar routes are being dropped and more suitable alternatives are being sought for the previously used means of transport. It is therefore not surprising that, for example, the first supply bottlenecks are occurring for new bicycles and that municipalities have introduced pop-up cycling paths at short notice. But the car is also used increasingly even in cities due to the low risk of contagion.

Changes in mobility behaviour lead to changes in traffic flows. These are directly related to road safety and environmental impacts, although the exact interactions are still unexplored. What is certain, however, is that urban transport systems will not only have to cope with such changes at present, but in all likelihood even more frequently in the future. In addition, challenges arise from climate change-related scenarios, such as those observed to a very extreme extent in the Ahr valley in 2021, and from structural change-related scenarios in the lignite mining areas. MOTUS aims to find initial answers to these challenges by developing a catalogue of measures to help municipal decision-makers make their own transport system sustainable and resilient. The chair of Transport Ecology is involved in the project by providing sustainability assessments for the scenarios developed within the project.

About the BMVI's mFUND:

As part of the mFUND innovation initiative, the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure has been funding data-based research and development projects for digital and networked mobility 4.0 since 2016. Project funding is supplemented by active professional networking between stakeholders from politics, business, administration and research and by making open data available on the mCLOUD portal. Further information can be found at: https://www.bmvi.de/EN/Topics/Digital-Matters/mFund/mFund.html

Project contact at the TU Dresden

• Dipl.-Ing. Maximilian Bäumler

• Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing. Julia Gerlach (for Chair of Transport Ecology)

Project duration

November 2021 - October 2024