Future Transport and Mobility Environment project – Final report

The final report of our competed project Conceptual architecture for future transport and mobility is now available, and can be downloaded from this page.

Partners with iMOVE on this project were Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads, and the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB). Authors of the report are ARRB’s Dr Charles Karl, Francis Cheong, and Dr Elnaz Irannezhad.

As an outcome, the project was to produce a conceptual architecture for a Future Transport and Mobility Environment and to propose a program to further work to address the gaps and development required to meet the needs for the future.

What drove this project?

As the transport and mobility environment becomes more integrated, this project looks to explore and challenge traditional approaches to transport operations and mobility. How do we move away from the way we do things today and think/act differently? The time horizon for the future transport and mobility environment envisaged is over the next 2-10 years.

The work was driven by a series of questions, and by some aspects of modern transport:

• How different would traffic management be if we started afresh today?
• What are the key performance metrics to operate our networks today?
• What are the infrastructure and operational impacts of the new technologies for networks?
• What are the commonalities across transport authorities and service providers (core functional elements and operations)?
• Managing across an integrated network with many mobility service providers
• Customer expectations of safe and reliable journeys
• Balancing supply and demand
• Improving network performance and reducing traffic congestion
• Challenges and opportunities with connected and automated vehicles
• Sustainability, carbon emissions and electric and zero emission vehicles
• Micromobility and active transport

Report findings

While the roles and responsibilities today and in the future look similar, the increasingly integrated nature of transport and mobility calls for a fresh definition of roles and responsibilities of actors such as the System Manager and Regulator which is currently fragmented across a number of actors in roads, heavy vehicles, public transport and freight.

This project was an investigation into traditional transport, and the challenges and opportunities of true integration – rather than the new simply complement the old – of transport with digital infrastructure and new transport modes and operators.

That scenario could also see transport and mobility provide benefit to, and gain benefit from, areas outside its own sector.

“The development of a clear understanding around the conceptual and functional areas of a future transport and mobility ecosystem also provides the opportunity to disseminate this knowledge to other areas outside of transport, for example, to areas such as aviation, defence, freight, Big Data, safety, research and standards development,” states the report.

“In doing so, several consulted stakeholders commented that it would result in a larger overall FTME vision, and also inform other domains as they develop their own visions and concepts.”

Download the report, watch the webinar

iMOVE, the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads, and ARRB have made available the final report for this project, Future Transport and Mobility Environment available for download.

For your copy of the final report please click the button below.

In addition to the final report, we also recently ran a webinar on this project, with speakers including:

• Dr Charles Karl, National Technical Leader for Congestion, Freight and Mobility, ARRB
• Ishra Baksh, Executive Director (MaaS program Management Office), Department of Transport and Main Roads (Queensland)
• Susan Harris, CEO, ITS Australia

We recorded the webinar, and it’s available to watch at Australia’s future transport and mobility environment.