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Challenge #82

Less congestion and noise in our cities.

We research the mobility behavior of city dwellers and develop new concepts for sustainable urban transport. The aim is to optimize traffic management and develop innovative vehicles.

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More and more people are choosing to live in cities. With more people, however, comes more traffic on the roads: traffic jams, pollutant emissions, and noise are increasing. That is why DLR is investigating how people move around cities, what concepts would make transportation more sustainable, and how we need to redesign urban spaces to achieve this.

Innovative technologies such as automated driving, car sharing, e-bikes, and drones have the potential to improve our traditional urban mobility systems. But they also create new challenges for the quality of urban life in the future, as the different types of vehicles could end up simply competing for parking spaces and traffic lanes.

We want to make the urban mobility of the future environmentally friendly and accessible to all. This means traffic should take into account spatial structures as well as social and cultural aspects. That is why we are working on the following topics:

  • Transport systems that meet diverse demands
  • Vehicle concepts that save resources
  • Collection of usage data for research into mobility behavior
  • Simulation of road traffic, including demand and traffic control infrastructure
  • Extensive testing of automated and connected driving

(Photo: DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0))

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