D6.2 Stronger Combined : Sustainability Assessment

Stronger Combined is a research and innovation project co-funded by the Interreg North Sea Region Programme. The overarching goal of the Stronger Combined project is to support experimentation with multimodal and intermodal passenger travel solutions in rural, small-town, and tourist (RUSTT) regions. The project consists of nine independent experimental sites, or living labs, in seven Interreg North Sea Region countries. Living labs are administered by either regional public transit authorities or municipalities with support from research institutes, universities, or private consultancies. Each living lab conducted at least one transportation pilot that attempted, through various means, to encourage alternatives to the personal motor vehicle. In all living lab contexts, the personal motor vehicle is the single dominant mode of transportation, which presents environmental, social, and economic challenges that Europe and the world must begin to address. The purpose of this report is to summarize and assess the performance of each pilot with special attention to increases in use of public transportation and decreases in carbon dioxide (equivalent) emissions. Communities in RUSTT regions face special transportation challenges largely because they lie outside dense transportation networks that tend to make multimodal transportation more efficient in larger cities. The Stronger Combined project aims to address these special challenges by piloting alternatives to the personal motor vehicle that allow travellers to more easily transition among multiple modes of transportation on a single journey. The piloted solutions vary enormously across living labs. They include several bikeshare programs that serve unique purposes in each context, a ridesharing service, a contractual restructuring that affords populations with special needs easier access to traditional public transit, a technical pilot testing a new national ticketing-and-payment standard, and a demand-responsive bus program in a mountainous tourist region. The pilots targeted user groups in very different ways and tested solutions over different time scales, making of pilots very challenging. At the beginning of the Stronger Combined project, the authors of this report endeavoured to apply the KOMPIS framework a series of data collection tools designed to evaluate mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) to each pilot. In most living labs this framework had to be adapted and downscaled to fit the capabilities and time scale of individual pilots. As a brief example, the full KOMPIS framework involves travellers completing travel diaries every day for a full week. Such a task is well suited for a pilot in which the key goal is for travellers to adopt multimodal travel habits, but it is unnecessarily detailed for a pilot that involves endusers renting a cargo bike for one or small number of specific trips. The COVID-19 pandemic also meant that several pilots were delayed or overhauled, requiring the relatively rapid development of new data collection strategies tailored to each pilot. The report below summarizes each pilot􀂶s contribution to public transit ridership and carbon savings, yet the most important and perhaps ironic finding in this report is that the context-specific nature of piloted solutions does not lend itself well to a one-size-fits-all evaluation framework. Substantial Stronger Combined D6.2 5 increases in public transit ridership were apparent in several pilot projects, however calculating the number of individuals that shifted to public transit modes was either irrelevant or impossible in most of the pilots. Similarly, we calculate substantial CO2 savings due to shifts in travel modes across many of the pilots, but it ... TBC