To understand multimodal door-to-door mobility, a main part of the Modus project has been the identification of future drivers of supply of and demand for multimodal mobility. A wide variety of factors has been assessed showing the complexity and interlinkages across social, political, environmental, technological, and economic decision-making factors. Potential development paths have been captured in the form of four future multimodal scenarios, including the pre-pandemic recovery, a European short-haul shift, strong growth with technological support, and the move towards a more decentralised mobility within Europe. The application of the modal choice analysis across a subset of these scenarios as well as to different routes within Europe shows that there is no general statement to be made regarding an air-rail joint mobility strategy. It can rather be seen that there are routes with already a well-established HSR connection and a high share of rail traffic. The potential of extending rail capacities in the future may therefore have a strong impact on air-rail market shares, and which sector may take up higher portions of additional demand in the future. These considerations have to be taken into account when making investment in infrastructure and/or designing mobility products and services.
A true multimodal transport system is called up to offer mobility services that are tailored towards such personal needs, including differences in trip purpose, value of time or the level of environmental awareness, for example. Hence, traveller archetypes vary according to their willingness to pay for travel products and services along their journey, or the requirements or process times along each step of the door-to-door journey. These elements are also reflected in the multimodal performance assessment in Modus. This assessment built on and extended two well-established simulation models, the Mercury passenger mobility model and the R-NEST tool. Both models have been advanced to take into account rail travel as well as door-to-door journeys in order to calculate according metrics. This holistic approach in Modus prompted the development of city archetypes, which is a specific combination of airport and railway connections. In order to assess the multimodal performance across the different scenarios, a number of experiments have been designed to evaluate the impact on key (multimodal) performance indicators, including door-to-door travel times, average flight waiting times, flight delays, or the gate-to-gate CO2 emissions. Each of the experiments has been run with and without a disruption, thus showing the impact on the different mobility metrics. The results of the Modus project have shown that there are some essential requirements and key enablers to foster multimodality in Europe. Among all these recommendations, we believe that it is essential to consider different scenarios, use cases and developments in long-term planning, also given uncertain economic, social and even pandemic-related developments in Europe. Scenarios can help to make sense of the future and to structure decision- and policy making.
