SuRuMo – sustainable travel in rural areas

Travel and transport is a critical societal function that is necessary to enable, for example, trade, work, education and healthcare. However, travel and transport have a number of negative effects such as accidents and environmental impact. Transport accounts for approximately 20% of global emissions of greenhouse gases. In order to reduce the environmental impact of transport, many different measures need to be combined. In the EU project Sustainable Rural Mobility (SuRuMo), we focus on achieving more sustainable travel in rural areas through cooperation between different actors, both public and private, as well as new tools to understand travel patterns in the countryside.

Achieving sustainable transport in rural areas is important in Sweden as well as in other EU countries. Partly because the residents there are often car-dependent and account for a large part of the traffic that affects the environment and climate in both cities and entire regions. And partly because not all rural residents have the financial means to have their own car for daily transport.

The project will develop a digital platform for various mobility solutions that can be used by EU residents, as well as develop tools that can identify travel patterns that can help traffic planners map areas where new mobility solutions can be introduced.

An important focus of SuRuMo is to involve rural residents, local groups and partners such as municipalities and public transport companies in the project, to better meet local needs and strengthen local awareness and support for new mobility strategies.

LiU's part in the project focuses on developing tools to be able to analyze multimodal travel patterns in sparsely populated areas. The tools for mobility analysis will combine mobile network data with ticket data from the public transport system and will be tested in three different regions.