Urban Mobility.

The megacity of Beijing is growing steadily, becoming more densely populated. Public spaces becoming increasingly scarce. At the same time, the 20 million inhabitants have an enormous need for mobility, which even the well-developed road and public transport networks cannot sufficiently satisfy.

The new Chinese urban development strategy aims to use digital means, among other things, to make cities more efficient, greener and more liveable – goals that the BMW Group shares and has been pursuing since 2016 with research projects and initiatives on sustainable urban mobility.

The BMW Group is working with the Beijing Transport Institute in the Reservation-based Mobility pilot project: drivers can reserve a specific time of day on busy roads, during which they are allowed to use a special lane. This is to incentivise off-peak driving and reduce congestion.

In order to ensure a sustainable implementation and use of the service, it is decisive to involve all relevant stakeholders with different demands, concerns and interests – such as government, enterprise, traffic management & operation authority, public travelers etc.

The Green Driving project is about incentivising drivers of hybrid vehicles or combustion vehicles to use their electric drive or the Eco Pro mode as much as possible in the city, reducing emissions.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area consists of 88 centres with widely scattered suburbs. They date back to a time when mobility was focused on car traffic. Public transport is little developed with thousands commuting long distances every day. At 83 per cent, the car is the most important means of transport, and 74 per cent of car commuters drive alone.

The BMW Group is working with institutes for transport studies at the University of California and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to research people’s needs and their traffic behaviour in a mobility study. What would persuade people to abandon their own cars and switch to more sustainable modes of transport? This knowledge is critical to be able to plan affordable and reliable alternatives that will be sufficiently attractive to car-driving commuters.

The Munich region, with a population of around 6.2 million, is predicted to grow by up to 300,000 inhabitants in the coming years. This would put further pressure on parking, congestion and emissions issues. Munich is also Germany’s commuter capital. More than 500,000 people travel daily from the surrounding districts into the state capital. While Munich residents themselves do not necessarily rely on a vehicle, vehicles remain essential for daily transport for many commuters. New transport strategies therefore need to take individual mobility and demands into account.

The BMW Group is working in the Munich Mobile Future alliance with all key stakeholders on strategic solutions for the mobility of the future. The participants include the City of Munich, the surrounding districts, the Free State of Bavaria, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Siemens, MAN, the Munich Transport Company (MVG) and the Munich Transport and Tariff Association (MVV). The alliance aims to change mobility significantly, aiming for climate neutrality and a liveable city with better air quality.

Some of the core questions to be addressed are: How do the residents of the inner city want to live? What do they want for their neighbourhood? What form of transport do they need locally? Which services can be expanded or rolled out? How can the number of vehicles in the city centre be reduced, while at the same time ensuring efficient and suitable mobility solutions for everyone in the city?

The alliance aims to address these issues by developing living and mobility strategies together with the residents. Workshops are conducted to identify needs and work out solutions on how to combine different means of transport. For example, unused vehicles could be relocated to a “neighbourhood garage” and the space freed up could be used for recreation or other purposes.

One of the projects is about testing this transformation in a central Munich neighbourhood to gain new insights in a practical setting. It follows, therefore, that the project needs to be open-ended: although some specific actions are proposed (such as expanding vehicle sharing and similar mobility services) – the residents’ needs and ideas contribute important impetus to the planning. The project will then be jointly designed and implemented accordingly.

Rotterdam is the second largest city in the Netherlands and very densely populated. The metropolitan region is home to 2.4 million people and it continues to grow. As a city by the sea, Rotterdam is no stranger to the impacts of climate change, so it has a particularly keen interest in developing climate resilience and reducing emissions. Today, the city is a pioneer in electromobility – the availability of charging points is among the best in Europe.

Rotterdam is working with the BMW Group to develop ways of using the scarce space efficiently and make the city even more liveable. They are sharing information and working together in many projects and studies over the long term to improve the sustainability and safety of transport.

In 2021, they extended their existing cooperation agreement to 2027 in a memorandum of understanding. Rotterdam wants to gain better insight into what role the car should and can play in the future, what the innovations are and how drivers can make the best use of them. A few examples:

1.  Electric City Drive. The study explored how drivers of plug-in hybrid vehicles could be persuaded in an entertaining way using an app to charge their car regularly and to use the electric mode of their car when driving in the city centre. The response was overwhelming: the study participants drove over 90 per cent of their routes in the city electrically. BMW has used the experience gained here to develop its eDriveZone and BMW Points functions. These are currently active in 147 cities in Europe.

2.  Charge & Repark. This project contributes to using public charging points as efficiently as possible. An app informs drivers as soon as their vehicle is charged, shows them a nearby available parking space and asks them to move their car to free up the point for others.

3.  Smart City Travel. This pilot project investigates which incentives are most likely to motivate commuters to park their cars at Park&Ride sites and switch to public transport, bikes and e-scooters to get to their final destination in the city centre.

4.  Data Insights. Many cars have sensors that constantly collect data – for example on road conditions. This study explores how this information can be used anonymously to make inner-city traffic safer and improve road maintenance. It also explores the question of how cars can warn their drivers in real time about traffic jams, accidents or other hazardous situations.

5.  Safe Drive Zones. This project aims to improve road safety and traffic flow by using the cars’ digital interface. The key question here is how do warning messages in the car – for example about speed limits or hazards of any kind – affect driving behaviour?

6.  Vehicle-to-Grid. The question here is whether and how batteries from electric vehicles can be integrated into the power grid to better balance demand and supply. Can the grid make use of charged electric vehicles as a reserve when many other electric vehicles need to be charged? The pilot project took place in Kleinpolderplein, a district in the north-east that Rotterdam uses as a “living laboratory.”