Mobility City Lab produces 25 project ideas for transforming the mobility in Joinville

The Morgenstadt Initiative in a strategic Cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH are supporting the city of Joinville in the development of a Roadmap for sustainable urban Mobility. The City of Joinville in the south of Brazil, home to some 560.000 people, is an important industrial site and is facing challenges brought by progressing urbanization. Various initiatives are being implemented in the effort to face those defies, as the inauguration of a Living Lab through their program join.valle to discuss relevant topics such as digitalization, CoCreation, Smart City concepts and the internet of Things. The Morgenstadt Mobility City Lab aligned with these efforts aims to support the city to become a model in Latin America for innovative mobility concepts.

The City Lab

In the first phase of the analysis, the Morgenstadt methodology was adapted to the local context of Brazil: indicators and action fields were redefined. Additionally strategic plans provided by the local administration were studied and an exhaustive web research was carried out. This pre-analysis formed the basis for elaborating a sustainability profile of Joinville regarding Mobility. The City Lab leader, Marielisa Padilla, highlights, that one of the key for the success of the city lab was that Joinville had already done significant research in the area, especially regarding the needed infrastructure and is planning to considerably expand the existent bike and the exclusive bus lane infrastructure. This and other projects are part of the mobility plan released last year PlanMOB.  Furthermore the city had important insights on the user’s satisfaction regarding public transport. For instance, people say that they would be willing to use bike as a mode of transport if there were safe parking infrastructure and if it was easy to combine it with other modes of transport.

The onsite assessment of the Mobility City Lab took place from the 23rd to the 1st of November. 20 interviews, 4 site visits and 2 workshops were carried out by our Morgenstadt researchers.

The most diverse strategic stakeholders from the public sector as well as research institutes and citizens organisations participated in the process. The Secretary of Urban Planning organized together with GIZ diverse interviews with representants of different department within the city administration but also with bus companies, cyclist associations, the regional administrations, energy providers, environmental consultants and German companies as Bosch, BMW and the start-up Station-i of the Zuweso GmbH. The assessment was done on the different strategic layers and the laboratory, which resulted in 25 project ideas tackled all of the relevant aspects for transforming the mobility in Joinville: Smart governance, socio-economic development, intermodality, e-mobility, and technical aspects as the restructuring of the tariff system.

Innovative Mobility Solutions for Joinville

Following 10 projects were validated, further discussed and detailed during the innovation workshop organized on the 1st of November:

1. Park & Ride Station

The idea is to create parking lots for cars and bicycles around urban bus terminals (initially in the south), so that citizens can park their vehicles in these places safely, also offering services of washing, mechanics, among others. The creation of well-equipped and attractive park & ride stations, complemented with express bus lines can promote the use of public transport.

2. Mobility Hub

The city has identified the need to transform the bus stations into more livable meeting points, with additional services and offering intermodality services such as car sharing, bicycle sharing, car and bicycle repair stations, lockers, etc. The use these additional services should become possible by updating the existing “Ideal” transport card.

3. Last mile delivery with e-trucks and e-bikes

Last kilometer distribution with e-vehicles and e-bikes can reduce the noise and pollution in the city center. E-cars are suitable for the short stop-and-start urban delivery routes and e-bikes are used mainly for post services and food delivery. The municipality proposes to identify empty public properties located in the center, which can be rented out to the logistic companies for its transformation into cross-docking centers, e.g.

4. Public train line “South-North”

Currently there are only six trips per day for freight transport using the rail infrastructure that go through the city. The existing infrastructure can be used for public transportation as well. Currently in plans, is a new train line to run from Guaramirim and Araquari in the southern part, that should be connected and integrated to the park and ride station proposed in the Itaum district, in order to connect passengers with train.

5. Co-creation online platform

It is innovation contest to develop solutions to the problems presented by the citizens. Citizens are invited to name the pressing problems around mobility in Joinville. Via a voting system, citizens can select the most “important” problems from their perspective. A challenge for the creation of ideas and proposals to solve them is organized and best proposals are selected and receive initial funding for their implementation.

6. Bike sharing & safe parking

Attractive and safe parking infrastructure for bicycles can be implemented in different strategic locations as the proposed park & ride stations and the mobility hubs. For electric bicycles, the parking infrastructure would need charging points or lockers for the accumulator. Additional services as a bike-repair shop can be also offered in bigger bicycle-parking infrastructures.

7. Open Data platform

A Platform that any institution of the city can feed to collect all different kind of information regarding mobility, e.g. public transport companies, sensors, telecommunication companies, citizens. This information needs to be collected in a common platform and be available to the public.

8. Establishment of a “Low emission area”

Establishment of a green area in the city center as an environmental (green) zone and introduce traffic restrictions based on the class of vehicles the city would like to exclude. Vehicles with high emissions will be excluded or pay more than others. The zone is delimited by special signs and could be controlled by cameras in combination with air pollution measurement.

9. New tariff-system with zones

Joinville has currently a unique tariff system. The tariff system can be restructured using zones. Clearly organized fare systems are easy to understand by passengers and can reduce ticket prices, particularly for short distances and thus promote public transport. Monthly tickets with a reduced rate per trip or different rates for different amount of trips (more trips-> lower price) should be as well be introduced.

10. City Green certificate

The city can implement and issue a "sustainability" or "green" seal to encourage companies to promote the use of alternative transportation modes among their employees. Examples: changing rooms so that employees who use the bicycle can get ready before work starts or provision of bicycles at no cost to employees.

Further project ideas make up the 25 project catalogue: Ride-sharing and real-time information applications, e-Buses for public transportation, soft regulations for promoting high occupancy in private cars, car sharing, the introduction of e-vehicles in the Municipal and University fleet and others.

The researcher Padilla highlights the importance of the project idea proposed of creating a so-called “Mobility Action Group”

Joinville has already formed the “Observatório de Mobilidade” but it is needed to extend this existing group with additional stakeholders and institutionalize it to ensure its influence and efficacy.

The action-group shall be created, to connect representatives of the city administration, regional administration, public transport, logistic companies, start-ups, the universities, cyclist associations, the regional government, financial institutions and others. The group should serve to define an “implementation agency” to guarantee the implementation of the jointly projects developed such as the ones defined in the city lab.

Apart of the consolidation of the results into a strategic roadmap for the city, next steps are the implementation of pilot projects such as well-designed and strategic located mobility hubs as well as last mile logistic distribution with e-cars and e-cargo bikes. For this implementation, the identification of relevant stakeholders has already started.

The GIZ projects “Efficient Propulsion Systems” (PROMOB-e) and “Energy Efficiency in Urban Mobility” (EEMU), implemented by GIZ on behalf of the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) accompanied the entire Mobility City Lab and are currentlynow evaluating opportunities to implement public private partnerships regarding energy-efficient smart and sustainable mobility in Joinville together with the City Lab team.

Partners, who would be interested in participating in the implementation of the above-mentioned projects in Joinville, are invited to contact the City Lab team. Aim is in the first phase to establish public private partnerships and systematically transform the mobility in Joinville and make it a reference in South America and beyond.

You will find the press release of the municipality about the Mobility City Lab here (Portugese)

Read the article in Anoticia here (Portugese)

Morgenstadt Mobility City Lab Joinville

For further information please read the final report.

>>Morgenstadt City Lab - Joinville | PDF 14,3 MB