Rethinking transport infrastructure investments and mobility management across the Brussels metropolitan area: from critical analyses to cooperative policies - MOBRU.

Mobility is a critical challenge for the Brussels Capital-Region. Even if this issue has been investigated for more than two decades in the region, projects with a supra-regional approach have received less attention.Yet in transportation matters, Brussels cannot be limited into its administrative boundaries. Moreover,mobility issues are linked with other metropolitan topics, such as the financing of the Region, the accessibility and the social cost of the access to the city and the attractiveness of the city both at the local, metropolitan and global level. Based on a multidisciplinary and interuniversity approach, gathering knowledge and know-how of the ULBIGEAT and VUB-MOBI research units, this project has the ambition of tackling the interregional mobility questions and aims at identifying sustainable transport solutions and developing tools for interregionaldecision making. This way, the project contributes to designing solutions needed to reach the objectives of Brussels-Capital Region' authorities about mobility. It fits also within the approach of the regional plan for sustainable development (PRDD/GPDO). Moreover, it will feed the future Mobility Regional Plan of the Brussels-Capital Region.This Prospective Research for Brussels will be focused on creating two crucial tools for interregional decision making:1° An integrated transport model based on the MUSTI and FRETURB model of the region, covering both freight and passenger issues.2° A multi-level multi-criteria analysis model that integrates the points of view of all institutional levels that are involved.These tools will be validated and used to tackle the issues resulting from the three following challenges: Planning inter-regional infrastructures:In the Brussels context, the planning of inter-regional infrastructures raises challenges: diverging goals, economic competition or environmental issues. The analysis will be based on four major projects: interregional tramlines, Ring road enlargement, Regional Express Network (RER/GEN) and bike highways. Mobility management and operation:In addition to public transport organisation, mobility management in the Brussels metropolitan space is a big challenge, in terms of flow regulation and organisation. Indeed, the creation of inter-regional toll schemes or the coordination of public transport schemes, pricing and services raise many novel issues.Logistics and freight transport infrastructures and operations:The last, but certainly not least important issue is the case of freight transport and logistics operations. This is both a European and Brussels metropolitan challenge, since both European and regional flows are rising and since Brussels is included in a very dense logistics space.This project will be based on a four steps methodology:- Identifying the current issues raised by these themes, in the Brussels metropolitan area;- Building an analytical framework based on scientific literature and on other metropolitan areas' practices;- Evaluating the operational propositions by the stakeholders, following the MAMCA methodology;- Establishing operational propositions for a better organisation of Brussels metropolitan space.Finally, these analyses will be integrated in a synthetic and operational document, explaining the main challenges for Brussels metropolitan space and the links between elements. Next to that, an evaluation framework will be available to analyse all future projects within the metropolitan area. Indeed, these are the strengths of the study:- offering both detailed analyses of the main issues, and a comprehensive approach of metropolitan mobility;- proposing a multidisciplinary/interuniversity approach, based on the expertise of the two research units;- coming to breakthroughs on the scientific level and on the mobility issues that Brussels is encountering;- the research topics are innovative in the way they cover: public and private stakeholders; infrastructures and operations; planning and management; passengers and logistics; the three Belgian Regions.