Merih Kunur / Vehicle Design

mobilicity: scenarios for sustainable public transport 2025

How will we travel on public transport around large cities in the future? This project set out to explore new directions in sustainable mass transit for commuters and residents in the crowded urban environment of 2025 and beyond.

Independent consultancy Capoco, which designs passenger vehicles for world markets and contributed to the design philosophy of many of Britain's current generation of city buses, commissioned the study to mark the 25th anniversary of its founding by Director Alan Ponsford.

"We've considered the key drivers of change for the next 25 years - sustainable development, energy and emissions, access, information technology, integrated systems, safety, social factors and the cityscape itself," says Ponsford. "I was keen to see if we can make an original statement about the future of mass public transport in the large city environment."

Depiction in popular films

Research associate Merih Kunur, an experienced researcher in transport design who holds degrees from Turkey's Mimar Sinan University and the RCA, began the project by exploring depictions of future multi-layered city transport in popular films. He then developed a research matrix based on three primary fields of investigation (spatial organisation of cities, social change and sustainability).

This matrix was tested and expanded in an expert forum at the RCA at which architects and urban planners, social researchers and sustainable technology and vehicle experts came together to debate a future in which world cities are becoming more polycentric.

Insights from the expert forum informed the development of user scenarios on specific sites in three world cities. London hosted a noon-time business journey from Covent Garden to City Airport by a male executive; Hong Kong, a trip by a grandparent through a densely populated shopping district to a main train terminal to meet her grandchildren; and Istanbul, a long evening commute home across the Bosphorus Bridge by a female office worker. Each journey was filmed and time inefficiencies and user discomforts analysed. A single vehicle design programme emerged from the analysis. In each scenario, the travel challenge of making a difficult journey across a city is addressed by a new zero-emission, hybrid-electric vehicle system that is driverless and runs on global satellite guidance sensors to fixed destinations.

The low-floor, easy-access vehicle module comes in three sizes - 12, 18 and 24 seats - and has a flexible interior that responds to different usage (airport-bound vehicle modules have increased luggage space, for example). The design concept has the ability to form a single train of up to six vehicle units for express journeys and then split apart into smaller modules to enable local access.

Express and local

In London, for example, the smaller vehicle units collect people from around the West End before forming a single train at a given point to head out to City Airport. In Istanbul, the opposite occurs: an express train heading out of the city divides into smaller local services, thus combining express and local services in a single vehicle journey. In Hong Kong, special emphasis is given to understanding the needs of older travellers.

By combining video footage of specific urban journeys with computer modelling of a new vehicle typology, it is possible to glimpse a future of city travel that is less frustrating and time-consuming, suggests Merih Kunur: "A greater sense of privacy is given to passengers so this approach is socially sustainable as well as environmentally sustainable."

research partner: Capoco Design

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