Making bus and rail more attractive and efficient.

Public transportation plays a decisive role in reducing urban traffic congestion, emissions, and noise, and in improving connections to rural areas. To encourage more people to take the bus and train, we at DLR are working to make these services more attractive, more flexible, and more efficient. Digital tools also help us to do this.

For example, we have developed regional mobility concepts that have buses running on demand. Citizens can call these vehicles as needed via an app or phone, thus reducing the number of empty trips. Because this only requires smaller buses, it also saves emissions at the same time. We are already testing such services in the real world, for example in the town of Schorndorf and in the Altmark district of Salzwedel.

We also want to promote the inclusion of disabled passengers in public transportation and are therefore working to develop barrier-free mobility concepts. Here again, mobile apps and shuttle services could be helpful in the future.

And finally, we want to ensure that passengers can travel safely by bus and train during times of a pandemic. To this end, we are investigating, for example, usage patterns during lockdown phases and aerosol dispersion in train cars. In this way, we can ensure that local transportation is attractive to a wide range of users, in cities as well as in rural areas.

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