Urban areas are undergoing profound changes due to the introduction of innovative means of transport. Moreover, the recent outbreak of COVID19 has opened tremendous challenges to the reorganisation of transport services, which are related to the massive potential shift in individual habits. To an extent, these new habits might be in contrast to the longstanding aims of reaching sustainable and equitable cities, for example, through the re-adoption of private means of transport by citizens, the spread of cities at much lower densities which exacerbate urban sprawl, and the attraction of living in small towns rather than large cities.
The interplay between innovative transport and potential new behaviours will revolutionise how individuals move within the city and reshape the city’s socio-economic structure itself. Regulating and supervising such a transition is a major challenge that calls for a significant and timely interdisciplinary effort. Planning tools can nowadays leverage a wealth of available longitudinal GPS data, allowing for a high-resolution and real-time monitoring of individual habits, socio-economic indicators, and the status of infrastructures. In parallel, modelling schemes have reached the maturity to support the conception of new scenarios.
The Creativity Team at Sony CSL Paris aims at implementing this agenda by developing algorithmic and analytical tools capable of merging the information from heterogeneous data sources to allow for the orchestration of validated scenarios. An important step in this direction is the Citychrone++ project, through which it is possible to explore in a very intuitive way the accessibility of urban areas by public transportations systems. Here, we focus on the mobility patterns in the COVID-19 era, both to understand the present and conceive scenarios for the overdue transition towards a safe, inclusive and sustainable mobility. Sony CSL Paris is part of the Task Force of “Roma Servizi per la Mobilità” aimed at accompanying the mobility transition in Rome in the post-COVID phases. CSL Paris is also part of the CUEBIQ’s Data for Good Program.