Urban mobility and active transportation under the lens: Adapting urban design to daily-life perturbations and heat waves – MUTATIS

Promoting and managing active mobility (i.e., walking or riding a bike or an e-scooter) in urban settings has become a major challenge; these active modes are particularly vulnerable to a variety of `perturbations' (in a broad sense), caused by their mutual interactions, by hindrances on the pavement or the road, and by exposure to heat during heat waves.

The MUTATIS project ultimately aspires to guide urban redesigns to adapt cities to active modes, by propounding best practices in response to problems such as: how to organise the smooth co-existence between active modes? how to arrange road works and unavoidable hindrances? how to optimally lay out cooling solutions (such as watersprays) in urban space, to make active modes more resilient against heat waves?

Current approaches are either conducted at too coarse spatial resolutions to address these fine-scale questions, or consider too idealised settings. Accordingly, with the foregoing practically relevant applications in mind, MUTATIS aims to push forward the fundamental understanding and modelling of the dynamics of pedestrians and other active modes at a fine scale in real-life settings, comprising spatial inhomogeneities. The proposed agent-based modelling framework is premised on the idea that these spatial `perturbations', irrespective of their origin and type, alter the dynamics by inducing a local walking or riding (dis)comfort, which effectively plays a role similar to a refractive optical index. Besides, this framework duly handles agents as decision-making entities intent on minimising a perceived cost, thus accounting for their anticipation capabilities, which are central for collision avoidance.

To guide the development and validation of the model, small-scale field experiments will be conducted in Work Package (WP) A, by positioning diverse hindrances of various geometries in natural settings, typically a busy pavement, and extracting trajectories using (privacy-respective) video-recording strategies.

WP B will extend a recent agent-based model of ours (which was shown to reproduce an unprecedented variety of crowd scenarios and which natively integrates a walking-discomfort field) in a stepwise fashion, by confronting its predictions with the empirical data of WP A. It will also define a revised walkability index based on the perceived cost in the model, which will be compared to field surveys.

Finally, WP C will exploit the advances of WP A and B to promote a simulation platform that allows users to simulate active flows and test the urban configurations that best respond to the above challenges. 5 or 6 case studies investigating local street designs and active flows in street-sized zones in different European cities will be carried out, with a focus on those where cooling solutions have been implemented to mitigate heat.

Thus, the MUTATIS project will provide more transparent insight into the collective dynamics of active agents capable of anticipation, and leverage this insight to tackle issues of practical relevance for active modes. A workshop in small committee towards the end of the project will give us the opportunity to engage with urban planners, communicate on our simulation platform, and disseminate our findings.