Scenarios for the future of mobility in Europe: Combining the scenario technique with the Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA)

Mobility4EU is a project that aims to deliver a vision and action plan for the European transport system in 2030. It aims to identify societal trends that will influence future transport demand and supply and compile a portfolio of promising cross-modal technical and organisational solutions that address these trends. At the heart of this process lies the Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) to assess the preferences of stakeholder groups across the whole transport and mobility spectrum (e.g. transport users, vehicle manufacturers, infrastructure managers, public authorities) regarding scenarios for 2030. While in previous applications of MAMCA, the scenarios were defined by the decision maker, this research proposes the combination of the intuitive logics scenario technique and the normative narrative method with MAMCA to appraise the preferences of fourteen stakeholder groups towards future scenarios for mobility in Europe by 2030 emphasizing the participative nature of the scenario building. Based on a survey of 33 stakeholders, we identified “policy & legislative framework” and “lifestyle & user behaviour” as pivotal uncertainties to steer the scenario building. They provided the basis for the development of four alternative scenarios: Data World, Digital Nomads, Slow is Beautiful, Minimum Carbon. Each narrative scenario describes future trends and technological, organisational or policy-related solutions to respond to the trends. In the next steps of the MAMCA a stakeholder analysis mapped relevant stakeholder groups and identified their objectives. The objectives were translated into criteria and each stakeholder group (224 stakeholders) weighted the importance of these criteria through an online survey. Then a panel of international experts evaluated the impact of each scenario on each criterion. Then we used the PROMETHEE method to produce a ranking of scenarios for each stakeholder group highlighting synergies and conflicts between the stakeholders. The scenarios Digital Nomads and Minimum Carbon are the highest rated for most of the stakeholder groups. This points to the importance of government intervention as both scenarios propose a pronounced role of governments in supporting innovation and interoperability. On the other hand, there is a disagreement whether the transport system should support an individualistic model of society, or a mobility system where resources are shared. These results were discussed with the stakeholders at a dedicated consensus-making workshop to come to a consensus on the consolidated scenario that best represents their objectives. This scenario has been taken forward to the Vision and Action Plan.