Faster, cheaper, cleaner: Assessing urban mobility

This work aims at systematically characterizing urban mobility. There are several possible approaches to the problem but this work focus on reducing commuting times and emissions using the current infrastructures and without increasing the cost to the end user and doing so in an effective and sustainable way. A set of pairs of destinations and origins was chosen to represent usual commutes and cover a significant area of a city. These locations were connected by car, motorcycle, public transportation, cycling and walking. The routes were performed in both directions at three different times of day which allowed for a better understanding of daily traffic variations. For each route and for each mode of transportation the route and time taken were collected and the emissions and cost were estimated. The data was treated to adjust the route and gradient difference between the collected data and actual roads. Measurements and estimates were compared and averaged for all the routes and for each means of transportation providing an overall view of the commutes. The different means of transportation were compared and the limit to which one mode has the advantage over another was evaluated, this advantage is however dependent on the chosen route.