Making Way for a New Mobility

When Rotterdam in the Netherlands finished its new Centraal Station four years ago, it took urban mobility in a whole new direction.

The station was one of the first to merge a wide choice of transport – international and national rail, metro, bus, trams, bicycle, taxis and parking for 750 cars into one “Mobility Hub”.

The mobility hub is expected to boost passenger’s numbers from 100,000, at its opening, to well over 300,000 by 2025.

Centraal also took the opportunity to reimagine how transport could now look in cities.

The architecturally striking, low rise “station” added shops, offices, leisure and indoor outdoor dining, transforming the precinct into its own iconic destination within the first-class city.

The sweeping concourse, landscaped public spaces, and pedestrian network not only connected the city’s disparate southern and northern sides but spurred new surrounding commercial and residential investment.

Four years on since Centraal’s opening, what does its legacy mean for the future of global urban mobility?

Related reading: Australian Cities Rank Lower Globally for Sustainable Transport

Build It and They’ll Come

The idea of Mobility Hubs, also known as “Transit Oriented Development”, “Over Station Development” or “Metro Precinct Activation” may have been considered radical in 2014 but has since rapidly developed.

Not so long ago, large metro stations were often constructed as standalone buildings with minimal shopping and very little connection to the surrounding city, offering rail as the sole mode of transit, but Mobility Hubs turn the transit equation on its head.

Mobility Hubs are designed to maximise connectivity, opportunity and growth by integrating different types of transport with innovative design, cutting-edge investment, commercial, retail, pedestrian and urban planning.

Now the concept transit investment can drive urban development or even regeneration is nothing new

With New York’s “underground railway” fueling Manhattan’s dazzling success for more than a century, areas closest to subway stations continue to see sustained investment, population growth and rising property values.

And nothing has changed. New York opened an entire new subway line, Second Avenue, a year ago that saw apartment prices within a ten block stretch rise six per cent. It also saw the square foot value of surrounding commercial property jump.

Mobility Hubs supersize this impact. Not only do they deliver greater numbers of people to a focal point, but they take a proactive approach to what planners call “placemaking” by encouraging greater visitors, activities and interconnected developments like shops, offices and apartments.

In other words, less about commuting per se and more about sustainable, accessible urban life, work and leisure. They provide the opportunity to better fuse mobility and cities in smarter, greener, more dynamic ways to help them thrive for longer.

Arcadis looked at how urban mobility was unfolding globally in 2016, naming 21 of the world’s best city “stations”. A handful – Rotterdam’s Centraal, London’s St Pancras, New York’s Grand Central, DART in Dallas, Madrid’s Principe Pio and Hong Kong Station – were at the very top, however, setting the pace on creating and delivering fully integrated Mobility Hubs.

Brave New Cities

It’s not hard to see why urban mobility is going multi-modal and interconnected as cities around the world face ongoing pressure of urban population growth.

The UN says two-thirds of the world will be urban by 2050, with an estimated three million people moving to cities every week. The world is expected to have around 53 megacities home to more than 10 million people by 2030, and 468 cities with more than one million.

Australia is no exception. Both Sydney and Melbourne are estimated to double in size to eight million people by 2050, with Brisbane and Perth following suit. But this number of people living and working in our cities puts a strain on mobility.

Nearly 70 per cent of Australians still commute to and from work by car. And more than two million already have return journeys of over 90 minutes, with Sydney ranked 17th globally for worst commute experiences.

Infrastructure Australia predicted the $13.7 billion cost of delays on roads in the six largest capital cities could grow by 290 per cent to $53.3 billion in 2031 if unchecked. At the same time demand for public transport in Australia is predicted to soar 89 per cent, and higher in some cities, by then as well.

Governments have responded by embarking on an ambitious transport revolution, with billions of dollars going into new rail, subways, trams, infrastructure, stations, bus routes and bike paths under and across all the country’s biggest cities. How cities then deal with them below and above ground is now the trillion-dollar question.

Here Comes the Future

How well Mobility Hubs adapt to the future given rapid population growth and constantly evolving technology’s is a major issue.

Will these Hubs still meet the needs of our cities once autonomous vehicles are a reality that could shift mobility back to roads or even to the skies?

So far, technology promises to play a key role in ensuring Mobility Hubs are future-proofed.

Ubiquitous GPS, Bluetooth enabled smartphones, high capacity rail signalling, Big Data, sensors and smart software, to name a few, are already reimagining the way we travel through innovations like mobility apps, “Mobility as a Service” and intelligent ticketing. Combining seamless, streamed connectivity, information, linkages and feedback are the backbone of how Mobility Hubs can and must operate.

The next big things in technology such as Artificial Intelligence, 5G connectivity, Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things, may even have far greater resonance for mobility and Mobility Hubs.

Technology’s rapid evolution has already taught the world about disruption, but Mobility Hubs can make sure they continue to play a key role in cities as long as they’re planned as flexible, adaptive to change and dynamic urban environments.

Managed Mobility

Mobility Hubs clearly make planning, economic, demographic, environmental and cultural sense in our 21st century cities, by being better able to focus, manage and connect multiple forms of transport and ever-increasing population growth.

Considering the ongoing impact of increasing cars -even when they are driverless-more roads, more congestion and more pollution – Mobility Hubs go to the heart of what sort of city we want and need moving forward.

So how can we make sure Mobility Hubs make a real difference to cities?

According to Arcadis’ MODe-a strategic framework to understand, design and build successful Mobility Hubs like Rotterdam’s Centraal, we have to get four essential features right.

These include accessibility and comfort, urban environment, social place-making, and economic development.

Mobility Hubs are increasingly seen as city neighbourhoods, embedded by transport, but expected to do far more than service commuters as efficiently as possible. Crucially their power is in creating a unique urban character while attracting sustainable investment in new offices, shopping, housing and services.

In fact, Mobility Hubs are breaking new ground in all sorts of ways. Multimodal mobility demands we discard customary approaches to development, zoning, planning and investment in favour of more innovative, flexible and inclusive solutions that drive new connections in all senses of the word.

One of the most important is how they are funded and ultimately built, with Mobility Hubs increasingly at the forefront of innovative public-private partnerships that seek to share the costs of these massive projects more equitably.

Sydney’s new Martin Place subway station is absolutely on message. The vast transport, pedestrian and retail concourse below ground will be built by global investment bank Macquarie Group.

In exchange, they will get rights to significantly reshape the surrounding precinct, including adding one of Sydney’s first 50 story towers on top, and reinvigorating adjacent office, shopping, public and cultural space.

This is not to underestimate the challenges of creating Mobility Hubs.

Building subway stations, complex underground thoroughfares, interconnected transport and pedestrian networks, or soaring skyscrapers simultaneously in crowded, expensive places like Sydney is tough. Costs, regulations, heritage, traffic and public interests can often collide, requiring meticulous, efficient and detailed planning and design.

Making sure Mobility Hubs reflect integrated city planning is also crucial. So-called Intermodal Spatial Programming is designed to ensure that Mobility Hubs along one corridor or across the whole transport network work together to deliver a coordinated, interlinked urban vision. Without it Mobility Hubs could potentially compete for resources, investors, services and new buildings, skew growth and investment unevenly in the process.

The People Imperative

It is a debate we can expect to escalate as Mobility Hubs become more of a reality in Australia.

In Arcadis’ global mobility benchmarking index, MODe, only Sydney’s Chatswood Station made it into the top 21 urban stations. But that could soon change. Both Melbourne and Sydney are investing heavily in metro and light rail. Sydney alone is building 31 new underground stations with four of them in the CBD and a vast, interconnected network of tram and bus routes.

The disruption this building is having on the country’s cities raises serious issues about the way infrastructure and multimodal urban mobility is being approached. Massive projects like Mobility Hubs and the interlinked transport systems they depend on not only need to ultimately deliver on their vision but continuously communicate to the community as they’re planned, designed and built.

That has not always been the case in Australia. The public’s goodwill is often flagged as roadworks continue to exacerbate already horrendous traffic problems for years on end, train and bus routes continually shift, trees and houses are removed en masse, and the city can look and feel like one giant building site.

Sydney’s plan to revamp its oldest and busiest Central Railway Station however, could be an opportunity to make sure the city not only gets the world-class Mobility Hub it deserves as a global city, but makes sure consumers come along for the ride.

To deal with a predicted increase in daily passenger numbers from 250,000 to 450,000 within two decades, the NSW Government is proposing a huge underground concourse that will connect current train platforms to the CBD, the South-East light rail currently under construction, and the $11 billion Sydney City and South West Metro line when it opens in the mid-2020s.

Central has the potential for the vision and impact of Rotterdam’s Centraal, but cannot only learn from the experience of the world’s best Mobility Hubs but ensure consumers are at the heart of those changes.

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