The Challenge of Data Analytics with Climate-Neutral Urban Mobility

Urban mobility is a major contributor to human-induced climate change, a challenge that urban and transport planning and spatial computing academic communities have been actively addressing. In this paper we argue, however, that the common data analytics research into incremental efficiency improvements of originally non-sustainable urban mobility systems will never be able to help reach climate neutrality – the goal we must achieve by 2050 as per the Paris Agreement. This imperative is exacerbated by the observation that improvements, by data analytics, in one segment of urban mobility typically have unintended and often adverse consequences in other segments. In this vision paper we argue for a data analytics agenda to advance climate action at the core of urban mobility research. This agenda must disrupt the way we think and operate, as much as it is disrupting the accessibility issues of society in cities.