Ten Questions to Advance Inclusive and Sustainable Mobility

NYU’s GovLab, together with CAF, TUMI and NUMO announce the launch of the “100 Questions on Urban Mobility and Transportation” initiative, which seeks to identify the most pressing and impactful questions to foster safe, accessible, inclusive and sustainable mobility, and potentially answer them through data science and technology.

This goal is paramount as cities need to learn how to use their data to better inform and justify public policy decisions made around urban development, clean transportation, accessibility to economic opportunities and quality of life in cities. As hubs continue to grow globally, it is crucial to ensure safe, accessible, inclusive and sustainable mobility in cities.

“Technology and data are powerful tools for designing and implementing public policies, but unfortunately, evidence-based policies today are the exception rather than the rule. Although cities have access to different data sources, policy planners often lack the tools and knowledge to turn data into actionable information and thus make better decisions,” said Angel Cardenas, Manager of Urban Development and Creative Economies at CAF. Identifying, prioritizing and answering policy questions is a key action for Latin American cities, to improve the management of our transport systems, and to anticipate and build resilient cities in the future.”

“We need to rely more on data to make informed decisions in urban mobility planning and to develop innovative and sustainable solutions to ensure the common benefit,” said Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder and director of the GovLab Data Program at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “To address the challenges of modern mobility, we must first identify the most pressing questions that data science can answer meaningfully and responsibly.”

The 100 Questions on Transport and Urban Mobility initiative, like those previously developed for issues such as migration, gender focus, air quality, the future of work and misinformation, will draw on the expertise of experts in the field to identify these questions. These professionals who master both urban mobility and data science knowledge will help identify the 10 most pressing and high-impact questions that have the potential to be answered by combining diverse (new and existing) data sources and methodologies used in data science.

“TUMI believes that data is crucial for cities, in order to facilitate informed decision-making on sustainable mobility. We are working together with our partners on the development of an Urban Mobility Data Hub, to make mobility data available to cities in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and thus shape the environmentally friendly digital transformation of mobility,” said Lena Plikat, Transportation Policy Advisor at TUMI.

“As we consider more sustainable and convenient mobility solutions to reduce car travel emissions, data and technology have the potential to guide us into meaningful progress toward our climate and equity goals. To make a real impact and find the answers we seek, however, we must first ask the right questions. NUMO is proud to partner with globally recognized organizations and experts to collaborate in asking and answering these key questions that will impact our mobility ecosystems in cities around the world,” added Sebastian Castellanos, research leader at NMO.

Through the 100 Questions Initiative, GovLab and CAF, together with TUMI and NMO, will be facilitators in fostering collaborations of different stakeholders around data and the creation of new public-private partnerships that leverage data of different sectors for the public good. This effort builds on the expertise of GovLab, CAF, TUMI and NUMO to boost the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance through data and collective intelligence.

We invite interested professionalsto email us at contact@the100questions.org expressing their interest in participating in the initiative. For more information, please visit the100questions.org or write to Stefaan Verhulst, initiative leader (sverhulst@thegovlab.org).