BrennerLEC” is an European LIFE project aiming at testing and applying an advanced environmental traffic management system on the Italian A22 highway, in order to regulate traffic flows and reduce pollutants, and in particular NOx emissions. In the framework of the project different dynamic policies are being tested, including the temporary reduction of speed limits due to poor air quality levels or during highly saturated traffic conditions. A dense network of meteorological and air quality sensors has been implemented for the project, aiming at fully characterising air quality and meteorological conditions along the highway. Moreover, an advanced modelling chain, composed of integrated meteorological, air quality and traffic models, will be developed to support the adoption of the different dynamic policies.

The experimental results of the first part of the project are presented, considering both the regulation of the traffic in saturated conditions and the environmental benefits deriving from the application of the reduced speed limits. In particular, considering the latter aspect, it has been found that, with speed reductions of about 15 km/h, nitrogen oxides concentrations at the side of the highway are reduced on average of 10%.

In the second part of the project advanced “environmental traffic management” logics are being developed and are intended to suggest the operators of the A22 Traffic Management Centre on a real-time basis when and where a variable speed limit has to be activated in order to cope with increasing traffic flows and/or poorer air quality levels. The novelty of the proposed solution is that for the first time an integrated approach is proposed, targeting the ambition to both bring the highway to its full capacity potential and to control the pollution generated by vehicles.

How to understand the tourist trend in winter sports resorts to propose activities mixing sport and festive atmosphere? It aims to ensure the sustainability of these territories subordinated to the leisure economy. If this is not new, the holiday is no longer an "atmosphere" related to skiing but an offer in-itself. Should the secondary position attributed to skiing be read as an adaptive response to climate change? The facilities reflect a search for sensation and fun experiences, like the Wetterleuchten festival (Austria), which combines in the high mountains skiing and party. The purpose of our communication is to question this hybridity between sport and celebration as an alternative strategy to skiing. We will measure the evolution of practice from a longer historical perspective. In France, located southeast of Grenoble, Oisans, and more particularly Alpe d'Huez, partly forged its fame on sports events: bobsleigh events of the 1951 World Championships and the 1968 Olympic Games, and the almost annual presence of the “Tour de France” since 1976. In 2019 the territory becomes the winter theater of a world-renowned Belgian electronic music festival: Tomorrowland. This gathering awaits 25,000 festival-goers for a week, a young and international clientele with a high purchasing power. Tomorrowland materializes new considerations of space and new cultural aspirations, inviting to understand the contradiction between the desire for recreational excesses (hubris) and the search for naturalness. We will analyze the sociocultural heritage of events through a historical reading. Different types of sources (local press, municipal council reports, stakeholder interviews) will be mobilized to take into account the evolution of representations. Tomorrowland raises questions about the eviction of certain populations (secondary residents). If the mountain territories have always been able to adapt, we will observe their capacity to renew themselves, in the light of new constraints.

Rural and in particular mountain regions pose specific challenges for mobility systems with respect to environment (heterogeneous topography and settlement structures; exposed to natural hazards [1]), transport demand (mixture of daily traffic of residents and local enterprises; increasing volumes in the tourism sector with seasonal variation) and infrastructure (arterial roads primary in the main valleys and lack of alternative routes; public transport relies on buses with only few railway connections). Clearly, these regions can benefit from new strategies and measures to increase resilience of the mobility system, provide alternative route and transport concepts, seamless integration of various transport modes (MaaS), autonomous driving to address the first/last mile, traffic management concepts to unbundle touristic traffic and demand responsive transport (e.g. for dispersed settlements).

Although, efforts to address these mobility related aspects and to provide new technological solutions are increasing on a global scale, their transformation for the implementation in rural and mountain regions is not always straight-forward. Strategies for the adaption and transformation of mobility systems are only successful and can be accepted when both users and operators have trust in new technologies and an acceptable level of service is guaranteed. At the same time, access to alternative, sustainable transport modes must be beneficial for both tourists and locals [2]. This can be achieved by analyzing and evaluating the user needs through participation processes and predicting the user’s behavior for instance in SP-off-RP studies. In the workshop, we will present approaches towards user-oriented mobility systems in rural regions based on findings from mobility related behavior research [3] and transport modelling as well as current automation trends for different transport modes and discuss their application based on experiences from several studies (e.g. Tbilisi [4], Vorarlberg [5]).

 

Thinking about Alpine region, the first thing that comes into one’s mind is the breathtaking scenic beauty of mountains and breeze of fresh air. However, with increasing energy consumption and environmental pollution, the air quality of this region is a matter of concern. There is a need to create awarness not only among citizen but also among tourists about facilitating healthy human-nature coexistence to retain the beauty of this region in a sustainable way. Mobility is a basic socio-economic need for people and at the same time it is the greatest challenge for reducing energy consumption and climate protection in Tyrol, western Austrian state in the Alps. In Tyrol, 43% of energy consumption is currently accounted by transport. In order to promote environmental friendly transport, Tyrolean Mobility Programme has been launched in 2013 and a change in mobility behaviour is expected by increasing the shares of public transport and cycling by 3% and pedestrian share by 1% until 2020. Many Tyroleans already use bicycles for short distances. If we focus on Innsbruck (5^th largest cities in Austria and capital of Tyrol), In 2017, it is rated as ‘Sufficient’ in terms of availability of resources to become a bike friendly city. Innbruck as a city, promotes from challenging mountain bike tour to relaxed city bike ride for tourists as well as to the local people. It also provide better information and accessibility to cycling routes in the city. As a organizer of the event ‘Road World Championship’ for best road cyclists in 2018, Innsbruck shows great motivation towards cycling. The bike-sharing (Stadtrad) option in Innsbruck includes 41 stations and 350 cycles. 2050 Tyrol Energy Autonomy Programme aims to generate a positive attitude towards alternative mobility option and electromobility is one of them to induce sustainable mobility choices in a long run.