Towards sustainable mobility : New solutions and approaches for Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans

Abstract

Sustainable mobility is a very relevant approach within the novel paradigm of smart cities. Modern urban areas have been built around automobiles, limiting pedestrian zones and reducing the circulation space for others sustainable transportation modes. Mobility have resulted in growing levels of motorization and congestion, causing many environmental problems, accidents on roads and lack of accessibility. The need of moving towards sustainable mobility is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 people will have a better quality of lives. This thesis proposes studying and analyzing good practices, measures, and urban planning approaches of sustainable development successfully applied in other countries, which can help as good examples to be applied in Montevideo. Also, the thesis proposes designing sustainable mobility plans to limit the use of private vehicles by improving public transportation, encouraging sustainable transportation modes, creating pedestrian zones, and changing the negative transformation caused by automobile dominance. The main contributions of this thesis are: reviewing the most relevant works related to sustainable mobility around the world and in our country; analyzing and characterizing sustainable initiatives of public transportation in Montevideo; demonstrating the viability of implementing a sustainable mobility plan in an specific area of Montevideo considering subjective opinions of people traveling from/to the area; and evaluating the same specific area of Montevideo using Transit Oriented Development, a well-known planning approach for sustainable development. The applied methodologies include urban data analysis (using operational data, personal inspection and a survey), mobility indicators and Transit Oriented Develpment (TOD) metrics. The main results of the study are that the coverage area of the sustainable mobility initiatives is a small fraction of the total area of the city, thus a significant part of the population of Montevideo cannot access to sustainable transportation modes; regarding Parque Rodó and Engineering Faculty, most of the people travel from/to near locations (less than 5 kms); land use in the studied area is diverse and it shows a reasonable compactness and good degree of functional mix which suggests that the impact of implementing a sustainable mobility plan in the area will have notable results. Overall, this thesis contributes as a tools for helping academics, transportation companies, and stakeholders to analyze and evaluate possible solutions to implement sustainable mobility plans. The mobility analysis of Parque Rodo neigborhood as TOD approach is the first academic work developed for a specific area in Montevideo. Regarding the replicability of the study, the proposed methodologies can be applied to characterize the mobility demands and the sustainable mobility analysis on other relevant neighborhoods in the city. In addition, the reported case of study in Parque Rodó neighborhood provides a basis for building more powerful surveys and data collection activities to better understand sustainable mobility in the whole city.