For students, the individual car currently plays hardly any role in the choice of transport to the TU Dresden. In the 2018 survey, the proportion of students who came to the university by private car was about 4% .

© Rico Wittwer

This is not only due to the lower car availability among students, because after all, more than 30% of the students stated in the survey that they had access to a car. Also, in 2003, the share of car use among students at the TU Dresden was still 20%. The reason for the low car use among students in 2018 is largely due to the semester ticket. The share of public transport used by students to get to and back from the university is between 46% and 68%, depending on the season. The Semesterticket can therefore be rated as very effective in terms of an environmentally-oriented choice of transport. However, the semester ticket obviously also has the undesirable effect that in the 2018 survey period only 23% of the students came to the university by bicycle, while this proportion was 40% among the employees, despite the tendency toward further commutes and higher age among employees.

© Rico Wittwer

Of the employees, approx. 29% came to work by car in 2018. This share has decreased by 6 percentage points since 2008. The mode of transport has shifted more towards public transport and cycling. The job ticket is still quite uncommon among TU Dresden employees, as only 16% of the 25% of employees who used public transport to get to work had a job ticket.

The 29% share of MIV (motorized private transport) is already a comparatively good value when comparing it to the MIV share on average of the Dresden population for their commutes to work, which was still 40% even for domestic traffic, i.e. commutes that start and end in the Dresden city area. Among university employees bicycle use for the way to work is significantly higher than the average in Dresden.

© Falk Richter

As part of the HochN project, the CO₂ emissions caused by the commutes of the members of TU Dresden were determined in 2017. The calculations showed that about 35,000 students emitted fewer greenhouse gases in total than the 8,200 employees. The adjacent figure shows the distribution of CO₂ equivalent emissions for students and employees.

© Falk Richter

If we calculate the specific CO₂-equivalent emissions per person (student and employee) from these figures, we find that employees cause five times the per capita emissions of students due to the higher proportion of cars. The 412 kg released per year is almost half of the long-term CO₂ total target value of one ton of CO₂ per person.

A mobility concept is currently being developed for the main campus of TU Dresden, which deals intensively with topics such as mobility management, parking space management and traffic space design. The mobility vision strives for an accessible, lively, sustainable and innovative TU campus with a high quality of outdoor areas. Fields of action are in particular the following:

•     Attractiveness of active mobility in general (walking and conventional/electrically assisted cycling).
•     Improving conditions for cyclists (parking facilities, infrastructure on the main campus, rental systems, service)
•     Improvement of conditions and information on the job ticket
•     Parking space management
•     Innovative mobility solutions (e.g. job bike, company bikes, shared mobility, new concepts of micromobility, digital mobility)