Future of Cities

VULNERABLE ROAD USERS SAFETY

“Identifying urban features for vulnerable road user safety in Europe”, EPJ data science, 2022. 

Klanjčić M, Gauvin L, Tizzoni M, Szell M

One  of  the  targets  of  the  UN  Sustainable  Development  Goals  is  to  substantially  reduce  the  number of  global  deaths  and  injuries  from  road  traffic  collisions.   To  this  aim,  European  cities  adopted  various urban mobility policies, which has led to a heterogeneous number of injuries across Europe.  Monitoring the

discrepancies in injuries and understanding the most efficient policies are keys to achieve the objectives of Vision Zero, a multi-national road traffic safety project that aims at zero fatalities or serious injuries linked to road traffic.  Here, we identify urban features that are determinants of vulnerable road user safety through the analysis of inter-mode collision data across European cities.  

MICROMOBILITY NETWORK PLANNING

“Data-driven micromobility network planning for demand and safety”, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. 2022. 

Folco P, Gauvin L, Tizzoni M,  Szell M

Developing safe infrastructure for cycling and micromobility is an efficient pathway towards climate-friendly, sustainable, and livable cities. However, urban cycling infrastructure is typically planned ad-hoc and at best informed by survey data.

For a systematic, data-driven planning process here we develop an automated planning framework using data of the existing network and of empirical e-scooter trips and bicycle crashes as proxies for demand and safety, to generate a cohesive network. We introduce a parameter that tunes the focus between demand-based and safety-based development, and investigate systematically this trade off for the city of Turin. We find that a full focus on demand or safety generates different network extensions in the short term, with an optimal tradeoff in-between. In the long term our framework improves overall network quality independent of short-term focus.

COVID AND HUMAN MOBILITY

“COVID-19 outbreak response, a dataset to assess mobility changes in Italy following national lockdown”. Scientific Data, 7 2020  

Pepe E, Bajardi P,  Gauvin L, Privitera F, Lake B, Cattuto C, Tizzoni M

Following the identification of the first infections, on February 21, 2020, national authorities had put in place an increasing number of restrictions aimed at containing the outbreak and delaying the epidemic peak.  In our study we provided the first quantitative assessment of the impact of lockdown on the mobility and the spatial proximity of Italians, through the analysis of a large-scale dataset on de-identified, geo-located smartphone users. With respect to pre-outbreak averages, we estimated a reduction of 50% of the total trips between Italian provinces, following the lockdown. In the same week, the average users radius of gyration had declined by about 50% and the average degree of the users proximity network has dropped by 47% at national level.

COVID AND HUMAN MOBILITY

“Evidence of pandemic fatigue associated with stricter tiered COVID-19 restrictions", PLOS Digital Health, 2022 

Delussu F, Tizzoni M, Gauvin L

Despite the availability of effective vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, non-pharmaceutical interventions remain an important part of the effort to reduce viral circulation caused by emerging variants with the capability of evading vaccine-induced immunity. With the aim of striking a balance between effective mitigation and long-term sustainability, several governments worldwide have adopted systems of tiered interventions, of increasing stringency, that are calibrated according to periodic risk assessments. A key challenge remains in quantifying temporal changes in adherence to interventions, which can decrease over time due to pandemic fatigue, under such kind of multilevel strategies. Here, we examine whether there was a reduction in adherence to tiered restrictions that were imposed in Italy from November 2020 through May 2021.