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Mobilising thoughts about sustainable cities

Studying the future of Sustainable Transport Solutions

ABOUT THE MOBILITY RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP™

The Mobility Research Partnership (MRP™) is an independent research body born out of a partnership between academics and researchers across Australia and New Zealand.

Working with its partners, the MRP™ catalyses research on sustainable transport to identify and promote priority pathways to reduce global transport emissions and other topics, including:
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Mobility’s economic and social value to a city, including strategies to address transport poverty and promote social inclusion.
The environmental impact of micromobility in improving air quality and reducing transport emissions.
Understanding the current and potential future use of micromobility as a mode of transport, and its impacts on car-use and car-ownership.
Delivering safe and sustainable transport futures.
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MRP™ continues to grow its academic collaborations globally with the aim to educate and inform towards a less emitting transport future.

We're always looking for partners to join us on the journey. If you're an academic, industry expert or researcher interested in the field of sustainable transportation, please reach out to us on collaborations@mrp.org

The Partners

We bring together universities' academics, researchers and industry experts to study sustainable transport future.

Meet our partners

UN SDG

We research sustainable transport to identify and promote priority pathways to reduce global transport emissions and other topics.

The Newsroom

Find out the latest mobility articles that we are reading currently.

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An overview of how the University of Auckland’s TRC operates

The University of Auckland’s Transportation Research Centre (TRC) is dedicated to conducting research covering all transportation aspects. We explore a broad range of transportation and mobility research, including transport safety, construction materials and infrastructure design and asset management, traffic systems, AI and advanced modelling, new transport technologies, user behaviours, and public transit.

Partner's Testimonial

See what our partners have to say about mobility

Tom Cooper
The Beam Australia and New Zealand’s General Manager

“Since our launch into Australia and New Zealand, Beam has always been committed to working with academics and researchers to examine the impacts

of micromobility on the environment, cities and communities which we operate in.

It is with great excitement that Beam initiates the Micromobility Research Partnership™, with a commitment to contributing funding, our aggregated data and other operational findings towards greater understanding of micromobility in the region.

Beam is committed to partnerships that better improve Australians' and New Zealanders’ access to multi-modal transport, and we see this partnership as yet another step taken towards enabling shared mobility solutions for all in Australia, New Zealand, as well as globally.

This will encourage and enable increased research and study into micromobility in the region.”

Ferdinand Balfoort
The Impact Consultant

“Transport emissions globally continue to rise in spite of efforts to reduce these to meet Paris Agreement targets. Transport-related emissions also represent

a significant portion of global emissions and contribute significantly to mortalities and health issues globally. I am therefore looking forward to engaging with my academic peers in cutting edge research on transport sustainability, to thereby provide policymakers and governments reliable insights and data, and hence accelerate the reduction in reliance on traditional fossil-fuelled transportation”

Dr Maisie Rahbar

"The MRP will pave the way for understanding micro-mobility users’ travel behaviour, evaluating the role of micro-mobility in developing a multi-modal transport system, calculating transport emissions reduction

as a result of modal shifts toward micro-mobility, and delivering safe and sustainable transport through providing data and supporting the research community across the globe."

Professor Hussein Dia

“The MRP will help provide the research community with access to much-needed data to evaluate the sustainability and safety aspects of micromobility, particularly at a time when the industry is witnessing

a rapid growth of technology and digitalization improvements leading to increasingly more durable and sustainable devices. This initiative will create opportunities for collaboration between researchers across the globe which will help to share case study results, quantify benefits and remove barriers to wide-scale adoption. The MRP will lead to the development of meaningful research to provide evidence of the role of micromobility as a solution to reduce reliance on private vehicle travel, particularly for first and last kilometre connections to transport hubs and for short commuting trips.”

Dr Robin Smit

“It is unlikely we will achieve a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions solely through electrification of the road transport sector. The focus should also be on improving energy efficiency.

It is simple: the heavier a vehicle, the more energy is required per kilometre of driving. So light-weighting and down-sizing of the on-road fleet and reversing the trend of ever-larger and heavier vehicles will be critical to address climate change. Micro-mobility will play a pivotal role in the transition to sustainable transport.”

Professor Mark Stevenson

“We are confronted by significant global health challenges in the 21st century, which are prompting calls to rethink how we deliver key urban systems.

This is particularly the situation when dealing with the transport system. Our transport futures will rely on new initiatives such as micromobility. I welcome the MRP; a partnership that will support independent, robust research and provide the important insights necessary for transport planning and policy decisions now and into the future.”

John Nelson

”One of the positives we can take from the pandemic is the renewed interest in active modes. We must seize the opportunity to ensure this is not merely a fleeting moment and work together to embed active

mobility as a core component of local transport planning.”

Stephen D Greaves, Ph.D.

“Micro-mobility is front and central for sustainable last-mile passenger and freight solutions. As cleaner/greener modes, they promise a relatively affordable way to reduce the environmental

and spatial impact of transport, contributing to healthier/liveable cities. However, their introduction in a safe and compatible way onto the existing urban transport landscape poses challenges for operators, consumers and policy-makers. Research is needed to inform the wise deployment of micro-mobility, which will require changes to infrastructure, regulations, and cultural norms around transport.”

Associate Professor Doug Wilson & Associate Professor Yun Sing Koh

"This partnership provides a genuine opportunity for research collaboration and advancing state-of-the-art research to promote and extend sustainable

transport whilst minimising transport-related emissions and building environmental resilience.

To quickly transition to a low / zero emission transport system requires strong leadership that enables effective collaboration of communities, agencies and industry to turn sustainable mobility visions into action. Business as usual’ will be seen by future generations as a failure, meaning that we will have missed opportunities to improve both social and environmental sustainability outcomes at a time of unprecedented technology uncertainty and change. Decisions on infrastructure and technology adoption must be evidence based to ensure preferred future options are realised. The safe trialing of new micro-mobility technologies (e.g. Beam) that serve short to medium length trips or first and last kilometre mobility requires the appropriate trialing, data monitoring, analytics and evaluation of user behaviours.

A partnership between researchers, agencies, communities of users and industry will help us to together ensure better outcomes and enable evidence-based policy and the appropriate regulatory systems are put in place to manage these systems’. The Transportation Research Centre (TRC) of the University of Auckland is looking forward to working within the MRP to help meet transport mobility, access and community sustainability imperatives.”

Newly Joined Partners

We invite academics, researchers and industry experts in the field of sustainable transportation and micromobility to make contact to join our journey.

Mr Ferdinand Balfoort (MA, CA, CIA)

Senior Researcher

Mr Ferdinand Balfoort is a Doctoral candidate at Charles Darwin University, commencing September 2023. His doctoral research will focus on Legal Reform and Sustainability, based on a triangulation of several philosophies including Distributive Justice, positivist legal theory and Sustainability principles and frameworks, from an institutional and regulatory perspective, through the lens of sustainability technology projects, including Micromobility. In parallel Ferdinand continues his career development as a global professional advisor and academic researcher in the areas of ESG, sustainable transport and micromobility as well as governance, compliance and financial and sustainable impact reporting. Since 2016 Ferdinand has worked on a range of green technology/ ESG projects globally, both for listed and unlisted clients, and has extended his financial accounting and audit expertise to sustainability accounting, standards, modeling, and carbon certification. He has project managed complex sustainable transportation and logistics projects with multinationals and university partners, including at Tata Steel, Blue Scope Steel, SkyNRG/KLM, Rio Tinto, as well as EU and Asian government agencies and research institutions (CSIRO (Australia), Callaghan Institute (NZ), Khazanah Nasional Bhd (Malaysia). Ferdinand is the carbon certification lead for Urban Analytica, a University of Melbourne transport technology spin off focusing on applied telematics and IoT technology to reduce transport emissions. He was previously the sustainable transport advisor to Beam Technology (APAC), where he developed sustainability frameworks, carbon emission models and sustainable accounting approaches for the micromobility sector, to certify the measurable reduction in traditional fossil fuelled transport mode GHG emissions to Gold Standard and Clean Development Methodology (CDM) standards.

Darius Balfoort

Director

My focus is on delivering measurable charitable outcomes, I point the compass in the right direction and seek to establish virtuous cycles. Social and environmental sustainability was a topic that I was first introduced to as a child and is something that I have carried forward into every activity that I engage in, personally and professionally. In this regard, my goals and expectations align with the MRP.

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When I first came into sustainability sectors, greenwashing was a much touted term that emerged reasonably quickly. Greenwashing is itself, a symptom of actions that don't focus on delivering measurable social and environmental positive outcomes. In short, if you don't point your compass in the right direction, you won't have the desired outcome. Sustainability was not supposed to be an afterthought. Any structures, frameworks, organisations, et al that didn't initially start out with an intention to do the right thing (inside and out of financial outcomes) will thereby be struggling to meet increasing global pressures to report and reduce their emissions to any significant degree. Contrary to popular opinion, financial outcomes don't solve everything. It has always been astounding, to me, that this isn't more self-evident.

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The MRP doesn't have this problem and has positioned itself from the outset, as an organisation that looks to advise mobility and transport sectors to do the right thing through the redesign and restructuring of their internal governance and reporting frameworks. In their current form, they don't efficiently measure the true social and environmental impacts of existing and proposed technology solutions.

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Dr. Richard Buning

Senior Lecturer

Dr. Buning is a Senior Lecturer within the tourism discipline in the University of Queensland Business School. His research interests reside at the intersection of physical activity, travel, and events. Within this area, his research agenda is focused on how tourists are physically active as both a driver of tourism behaviour (i.e., active lifestyle sports) and during visitation (i.e., active transport). His research works on active lifestyle sports closely mirrors his passions in active sport tourism for mountain biking, cycling, running, rock climbing, hiking, and more. His work crosses over to active transport through bikeshare, eScooters, and more generally micromobility where he is focused on tourism usage and related impacts.

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