Emerging Mobility Solutions and their Impacts in Zurich, Switzerland.

Abstract

The world is witnessing the high environmental cost of the automobile and the big jump in accessibility it provided more than a century ago. The cars are standing idle most of the time, requiring endless number of parking spaces in order to provide high accessibility to car owners. Moreover, when they are not occupying parking spaces cars are standing in traffic jams, slowly finding their way on the congested roads. These among other ever growing negative impacts of the automobile on the environment and people, have jump-started a series of developments and initiatives to ameliorate these problems. Sharing resources has emerged as one of the possible solutions. Through the sharing paradigm new transportation solutions have emerged. This dissertation focuses on two distinct shared transportation concepts independently: carsharing and urban air mobility. Carsharing has been already around for several decades, but it is still struggling to move beyond a niche transportation mode. However, the attractivity of carsharing is constantly rising and research to better understand its potentials, benefits and potential hurdles is necessary in order to advise future developments. While carsharing as a mode is available on every continent, urban air mobility is an emerging shared mobility solution that is still in the conceptual phase. Early investigations on the market potentials of this service can steer the technological developments, transport policies, and regulations. The work presented here utilizes a multi-agent transport simulation (MATSim) as a core upon which the simulation of carsharing and urban air mobility is built. While the implementation of the carsharing extension of MATSim can be considered highly advanced with little room of expansion in the future, Urban Air Mobility implementation in MATSim has just scratched the surface. Looking at the findings of this thesis, the reader can gain valuable insights into potentials of different carsharing services, their interaction with parking infrastructure, non-monopolistic market issues and finally optimization benefits. Work on urban air mobility provides first documented insights on the demand for this kind of service, depending on the vehicle characteristics and cost, and it provides optimization suggestions to lower both fixed and variable costs. All these can be valuable to government officials, policy makers, and academics alike, for shaping the future of transportation systems.Die Arbeit stellt mithilfe einer Multiagenten Transportsimulation zwei von einander unabhängige Transportkonzepte vor, das Car-Sharing und die urbane Luftmobilität. Das Marktpotenzial von Car-Sharing wächst stetig und hat sich von einem Nischentransportmittel weltweit etabliert, während sich die urbane Luftmobilität als aufstrebende Shared-Mobility-Lösung, noch in der Konzeptionsphase befindet. Der Leser erhält Einblicke in die Potenziale verschiedener Carsharing-Dienste und deren Zusammenspiel mit der Verkehrsinfrastruktur. Die Untersuchung zur urbanen Luftmobilität liefert erste Einblicke in die Nachfrage dieses Fahrzeug-Services und benennt fixe als auch variable Kosten. Die örtlich angepasste Kombination verschiedener Transportsysteme gestalten die Mobilität nachhaltiger und den Stadtverkehr verträglicher.