Driven by population growth, environmental forces and health concerns, urban mobility intertwines with multiple aspects of urban daily life. One of the megatrends over transportation is accelerating urban mobility towards active modes [01]. However, active mobility is still less considered in general, particularly in developing countries, where a majority of citizens prefer to travel with personal vehicles regardless of the multilateral benefits of active mobility from physical/mental wellbeing of citizens to shaping local communities to reduction of carbon footprint of the cities.
Tehran is not well-equipped with infrastructure for active mobility, and suffers from an inefficient disconnected transportation system. To tackle this challenge, instead of forcing towards a radical change, it seems more feasible and viable to facilitate the transition towards green and healthy urban mobility through developing multimodal transportation models by combining active and passive modes of travel, each one making up the shortcomings of the other.
Urban Mobility Studio was aimed at developing a multimodal transportation model in the heart of Tehran, providing the citizens the opportunity to experience a continuous accessible path of travel (CAPT) through an urban demo. The experience is about how the citizens can easily fill the gap between two major disconnected stations of public transportation in the city center (Vali-e-asr and Haft-e-tir) via active modes of travel (specifically walking and cycling).
The urban demo is designed as a gamified experience of walking and biking along a 5657meters-long route, combined with multiple diverse side activities around the neighborhood. Through following the route and also changing the mode of transport from biking to walking and vice versa, the participants of the urban demo can collect points which power them to spend in private urban services around such as galleries and cafes. It is tried to shape a multidimensional experience for the participants through incentives, followed by tweaking the route via soft and hard urban interventions like adding signs and symbols, informative boards, and pedestrian gap fillers to the body of the streets.
The urban demo is currently under further development and will be launched by summer 2020.
