ITRL Seminars

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from urban freight transport is essential for creating sustainable cities. However, emissions from this sector continue to rise. Many European countries have introduced financial incentives to encourage using electric vehicles to reduce emissions in urban freight transport. Despite these efforts, electric vehicles account for only 1.2% of new registrations for light commercial vehicles (LCV), a small portion compared to the higher adoption rates seen in passenger vehicles. Indeed, the literature still identifies the high costs of electric LCV as a significant adoption barrier. This presentation will focus on the impact of financial incentives on the total cost of ownership of electric LCV in the EU and their role in achieving cost-competitiveness of electric vehicles. Additionally, it will explore the factors influencing the diffusion of electric LCV and specific determinants addressing disparities across the European Union.

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 In a series of design-driven living labs from 2014-2024, possible sustainable futures have been prototyped in the context of people’s everyday lives. In most cases, these futures have concerned personal transportation. Here, users engaged as 'co-researchers' have been challenged to try out change and explore socio-technical system shifts' complexities. Relevant private and public actors have been engaged hands-on in these learning processes and helped uncover system-level tensions and deficiencies. To understand possible sustainable futures and to sufficiently address the need for behaviour change, design-driven and more open-ended research approaches could play an important role. Still, these approaches are resource-demanding and challenge common understandings of research processes and methods. In this seminar, Martin Sjöman from the Green Leap design research group at KTH presents some core concepts from his doctoral dissertation about real-life experimentation and discusses how different types of research are fit for various purposes and development stages.

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Electric public transport grids are oversized and underutilized by design. In contrast to this spare capacity luxury, electricity grids are suffering from serious congestion that threatens the rolling-out of electrical sustainable solutions such as electric cars and heat pumps. Therefore, a growing research momentum is looking at connecting third-party users to electric transport grids and managing this spare capacity among all users. Interestingly, it is already clear, as summarized in this presentation, that this multi-functional, multi-stakeholder public transport infrastructure is not only an opportunity but rather a crucial requirement for the sustainability and efficiency of the transport grid itself.

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