Megacities on the move 

The FIA Foundation has launched ‘Megacities on the move’, a major new study into global urban mobility issues and solutions.

Megacities on the move, a collaboration with Vodafone, EMBARQ and Forum for the Future, is a practical, scenarios-based toolkit designed to help governments, city authorities and businesses understand the challenges of the future and develop strategies which will allow people to live and travel more sustainably in the major cities of the 21st century. FIA Foundation has funded and supported the work over the past year.

The objective of the project is to promote and support sustainable mobility solutions for the future within private and public sector organizations. TRhe research team have:

• collected and showcased the most exciting current thinking about sustainable mobility. they set out six solutions for sustainable mobility, principles  that organizations can follow to help city-dwellers access the people, goods, services and information they need, and give examples of where these are already happening. 
• created challenging and compelling scenarios of the world in 2040 and the particular mobility challenges cities could face. These are designed to help organisations make long-term planning more effective by exploring what the future may hold for them.
• used the scenarios in city workshops in Istanbul and Mumbai to generate a wide range of possible sustainable solutions to the mobility challenges of the future,

The work will be disseminated widely in order to stimulate debate, promote investment and aid long-term planning for a sustainable future.

The work will develop further, with other organizations to develop sustainable mobility solutions, and using the scenarios to plan strategy and innovate new products and services. The study has already identified a number of actions organizations can take now to help create the sustainable urban mobility systems of the future.

• Create integrated mobility systems: Transport, urban planning, business, public services, energy and food supply can no longer be considered in isolation. There is a need to create integrated mobility systems that will provide people with choice, flexibility and seamless connectivity whether they are travelling from one place to another or accessing the things they need virtually.
• Mobility solutions must be accessible and affordable to the urban poor: Mobility systems must work for rich and poor alike, to ensure everyone has access to goods, services and job opportunities. Cities already have many people on lower incomes and this trend will only increase, as most future population growth will take place in developing world cities. Tailored mobility solutions must be designed to meet the needs of this population segment.
• Society must go beyond the car when providing urban mobility solutions: Current growth rates in car ownership are simply unsustainable: there are already one billion cars in the world, projected to grow to two billion within a few decades. Cities need alternative ways of getting around, and need to be designed for people, not cars. We will need urban neighbourhoods with the infrastructure to serve local communities and dense developments that prevent further sprawl, are easy to walk around, and provide access to key goods and services.
• Leverage the power of ICT networks for mobility: There is enormous potential for information technology to reduce the need for physical movement by enabling urban dwellers to access more and more services online. Using IT networks to connect and coordinate cars and public transport can also help reduce traffic congestion and accident risks.
• Radical fuel technology improvement: As oil becomes more scarce, expensive and a security risk, we will need to implement greater energy efficiency measures, as well as shift to powering vehicles with renewable, low-carbon fuel sources. It demands significant investment in battery and fuel technology to seize this opportunity and take alternative energy-powered vehicles to scale over the next few decades. Most vehicle technology experts agree that advanced technologies also have enormous potential to improve fuel efficiency.
• Behaviour change: Many of our future challenges are shaped by people’s values, behaviour and preferences. Everyone needs to think about ways to influence mass behaviour and social norms in positive ways to promote low-carbon, healthier urban lifestyles. Future leading cities will plan today to influence lifestyles rather than simply relying on additional road infrastructure and modes of transport.

Speaking after the launch of the report, Sheila Watson, Director of Environment at FIA Foundation said:

‘FIA Foundation is interested in promoting all aspects of safe and sustainable mobility globally. The pressures on that mobility will be felt particularly keenly in our cities as they grow and expand massively in the coming years. Existing solutions may well be tried to breaking point by sheer weight of numbers, and so we must look more widely and more imaginatively for alternatives.  We are really pleased to have had the opportunity to work on this study with Vodafone, EMBARQ and Forum for the Future, and we hope that many others will find this analysis enlightening, and will access the materials provided to help them to understand these challenges in the context of their own cities.’

For more background please see the following links:

See the Forum for the Future website >

Download press release (87kb pdf) >

Download the scenario films >

View animations exploring mobility in the cities of 2040 >