Urban Mobility Lab

The Urban Mobility Lab is a platform that supports a replicable process to transform the way goods and people move in Indian cities by identifying, integrating, implementing, and scaling cost-effective and clean pilot projects.

What Is the Urban Mobility Lab?

The goal of the Urban Mobility Lab is to create early examples of integrated mobility solutions to inform India’s mobility transition. The lab is a platform that supports a replicable process for identifying, integrating, and implementing mobility solutions in leading geographies, which we call Lighthouse Cities. Additional cities, called Scaling Partners, will work with and learn from the Lighthouse Cities; together, these leading cities will form a peer learning network to guide and accelerate the scaling of mobility solutions nationally and globally.

Why It Matters

The mobility system is complex and made up of many different segments, and designing with the whole system in mind—for example, thinking about the intersection of public transit, shared vehicles, and non-motorized transit—will result in a solution that is more efficient and cost-effective than developing improvements for each of these segments in isolation. By testing a number of integrated pilots in a single geography, we can see how these solutions interact and build on one another, and use the learnings to establish Indian cities as world-leading examples of shared, clean, and connected mobility.

Who’s Involved

RMI is administering the Urban Mobility Lab with the support of central, state, and city governments. The Urban Mobility Lab brings together project teams, government officials, and subject matter experts to collaborate on preparing Indian cities for growth in mobility demand. Since April 2019, Rocky Mountain Institute and RMI India have been collaborating on various projects.

What We’re Doing

Knowledge Building
We are building a knowledge base of best and emerging practices in urban mobility as a resource for Indian cities. Tools to support this include a webinar series and best-practices handbook highlighting the successes, impacts, risks, and lessons learned from relevant case studies in urban mobility.

City Analysis
We are creating a set of tools and processes for analyzing the needs and goals of a city in order to identify and develop a set of pilot projects most suited to that particular city. These tools will be used to determine which projects could have the greatest impact and easiest deployment in a given region, problems, and risks they might face, and strategies to mitigate these issues.

Solution Development
We are recruiting, engaging, and supporting sets of project teams, selected with the goal of crafting a portfolio of solutions that together address a city’s needs and aspirations. This process centers on Solutions Workshops—collaborative, facilitated, intensive events that bring together project teams, government officials, and subject matter experts to accelerate and integrate a set of selected pilot projects for implementation in a Lighthouse City.

Implementation and Scaling
After the completion of Solutions Workshops, we support the implementation and integration of pilot projects in the Lighthouse City. We monitor and evaluate these projects over time; the lessons learned from these projects, as well as the entire Urban Mobility Lab process, will be recorded and disseminated through RMI’s knowledge base network to inform policy-making and future pilot projects in other cities.

Resources

Pune, India - November 6, 2009: A very busy street scene in the business district of Pune, India. Pune is the eighth largest metropolis in India and the second largest in the state of Maharashtra.