Claus Köllinger from Graz, Austria is an urban transport and mobility management expert representing the Urban Mobility Observatory Eltis. Köllinger has, in cooperation with UBC, moderated two train-the-trainer workshops for the cities.multimodal consortium. In connection to the second training which covered the topics mobility management and mobility points we took the opportunity to ask Köllinger some questions about challenges, trends and dissemination related to sustainable urban mobility.
Read more about the trainings:
What are the biggest challenges with the promotion of mobility management to businesses and other private-sector actors?
- To convince them of the positive effects for both the employer and employee. For a company, mobility management is easily seen as a social greening measure, but in fact it provides options to save financial and material resources, offer more attractive employment conditions important for recruitment and adds to a higher productivity by having healthier and fitter employees.
- To overcome the very emotional topic of parking space provision at company level. Decision-makers are very reluctant to touch the issue of parking for employees seeing a possible high resistance from the employees’ side.
- To take up the topic and invest time resources aside the main business activities. This might take the form of only little resources at hand in addition to the main task or the will to only invest limited resources underestimating the time needed to construct and start an efficient mobility management scheme.
What are the up-coming trends within mobility management and multimodality?
- For mobility management:
- The move from producing solutions to single companies towards solutions for clusters of companies taking benefit from economy of scale in challenges, options at hand and measures to realize. Examples are: cross-company car sharing schemes, company busses and trip pooling.
- The increasing effect of good mobility options and services at hand in recruitment. Many companies realize the need to provide more than “just” good salaries as an attractor to future employees and place programs supporting employees beyond salaries. Examples are childcare, health services, sports as well as mobility.
- For multimodality:
- The exploitation and integration of new mobility options to service offers such as e-scooters and well set-up sharing schemes for different modes
- The societal changes taking place in towns and cities moving interest of people from single car use to multiple mobility options fitting to their different needs.
- The expansion of MaaS services facilitating a multimodal lifestyle by using and paying all options by one application only.
In the context of mobility management, how can storytelling be used as a tool for raising awareness about sustainable urban mobility?
- Storytelling puts the message to the level of persons and not just facts. It transports information at a personal and emotional level. People familiarize easier with a story of a person just like them compared to pure fact giving of economic, social or environmental information. To package the message in a personal and emotional way is more intriguing, more appealing and more convincing.
Text: UBC & Claus Köllinger, Eltis
Photo: mauro mora on Unsplash
