Background
Shared bikes, scooters and vehicles reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality, and enhance our living conditions.They are already transforming the way people move around the city. But these flexible and low-emission services are far from suitable for everyone. Gaps in design and policy mean that a large majority of these solutions are used exclusively by young urban adults.
But, over 20 million citizens of the North Sea Region, including families, children, elderly, and the physically impaired, don’t have equal access to shared mobility. These people should also be able to access shared mobility solutions throughout the entire multimodal chain– from the first mile to the last. By taking a people-focused approach, SMALL explores how to reduce these inequalities and make shared mobility accessible to all.
The SMALL project is a collaboration between six public authorities in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and France, a mobility operator, and three knowledge organisations.
Objectives
The overall objective of SMALL is to accelerate the transition towards inclusive sustainable mobility. SMALL will deliver 10 scalable shared mobility pilots in the North Sea Region to drive the shift away from private vehicles and work towards less car-dependent societies that leave no one behind.
Approach
SMALL brings together public authorities, knowledge partners, people with reduced mobility associations and mobility operators to co-create, test and demonstrate new shared mobility and active travel solutions to drive the green mobility transition whilst leaving no one behind.
SMALL will create a new topic guide on inclusive shared mobility, called the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP). The guide will serve as a European guideline for all mobility practitioners and will capitalise on transnational cooperation to raise awareness and address todays neglected mobility challenges.
Leveraging volunteering and social assistance, SMALL partners will deploy 10 social innovation pilots that test new innovative devices in the 7 participating cities (e.g. on-demand tricycle taxi services, and inclusive mobility as a service - MaaS). The resulting solutions will improve the economic, health, and social integration of people with reduced mobility and reduce their dependency on private vehicles.
Athena’s role
Athena will contribute to building the co-creation processes and strengthening collaboration between all partners and the targeted end-users and local associations. Athena’s direct contribution will be to conduct research to identify and enrich existing engagement co-creation tools (e.g visualisation tools) and train the pilot partners and build their competencies on co-creation to apply them at their local and national level.