FLADEMO – Comprehensive Mobility Service Guarantee

To achieve the climate targets 2040, but also as a reaction to the changing socio-demographic structure towards an aging and culturally more diverse society, environmentally friendly and affordable mobility offers for people not only in the city but also in the countryside are required. Looking at the climate targets, the problematic picture is that between 1990 and 2019, CO2 emissions from the transport sector in Austria grew by 74 percent. In the last years from 2014 to 2020, these have continuously increased, with the exception of 2020, where the COVID-19 pandemic led to a lower traffic volume. Technical solutions, such as switching to electric propulsion, will not by themselves achieve the climate goals: even more far-reaching transformations that move the entire transport system away from individual vehicle transport to other modes of transport are therefore needed. The goal of the project is to develop knowledge building blocks for the definition and implementation of a comprehensive mobility service guarantee (fMSG). For this purpose, the project team conducted a status-quo analysis as well as an analysis of user and stakeholder requirements. Modeling results show that simply improving the public transport offer (scenario "All regions get on board") is not sufficient to achieve the NMSG targets. The three scenarios "Focus on Active Mobility," "Ciao MIV!" and "Questionable Utopia" lead to the level (i.e., annual mileage to be reduced to 51 billion car-km by 2040) required to achieve the climate targets. This result implies that active mobility plays an important role in meeting the environmental goal of the NMSG. However, this does not necessarily fulfil the social or socio-political goal of the NMSG: this requires further improvement of public transport (both line- and schedule-based and demand-responsive public transport) with shorter intervals and longer operating hours. It is also noteworthy that the focus on carpooling (scenario "focus on pooling") will lead to potential rebound effects through a more attractive use of private cars.