Multimodality in the Swiss New Normal

The pandemic has accelerated trends and opened new opportunities for ideas, such as “Mobility as a Service”, hot desking, or trip pooling in small vehicles. All of these have to be seen against the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Multimodality across the days and inter-modality during the trip or tour are a condition that the envisaged new services can make a substantial contribution to the overarching goals. These daily decisions are predicated on the longer-term choices of work arrangements and the set of mobility tools, e.g., ownership of cars and (e)bikes, public transport season tickets, sharing system memberships.

This study will explore the current preferences for these linked choices in possible futures in a set of stated choice experiments with the same respondents. They will be able to adopt working-from-home (WFH). They will be able to adjust their set of mobility tools. We will explore their tour-based mode choice to get an idea of the response to new services. This will allow us to estimate the likely number of future commuting tours, the composition of the mobility tool sets and the multi-modality of tourbased mode choice.

We will apply these models using the IVT MATSim implementation both in areas of high potential for new services, as identified by SBB, as well as for the Canton Zurich.

This project will be innovative in its survey work, in the combination of services tested, as well as in the mode choice and mobility tool modelling. The results will inform policy making and investment decisions of both local authorities as well as of public transport service and sharing services providers.