GECKO project: turning mobility disruptions into opportunities

GECKO is the acronym for Governance principles and methods enabling decision makers to manage and regulate the changing mobility systems. A launch event took place in the afternoon of 10 December 2018 in Brussels.

GECKO will engage widely with a range of stakeholders, including city and regional transport authorities, passenger transport authorities, new mobility providers among others, to gather input on the experiences, lessons and practices on technological, social, economic, political drivers and barriers affecting the deployment of innovative business models, technologies and services. The project will explore three thematic areas with regard to mobility:

• Automation and emerging technologies
• Public Transport and Mobility as a Service
• Digitalisation and data-driven models.

During the event representatives from the three thematic stakeholder groups addressed in GECKO discussed how new mobility innovations and disruptions could be turned into opportunities for cities and regions. The discussion focused on the emergence of new mobility services such as app-based on-demand services (Uber, Lyft, etc.), MaaS, connected and autonomous cars and related policies, electric scooters, drones, etc. and on how these can be regulated with ad hoc policies in order to deliver a truly inclusive mobility for everyone.

“MaaS is the new tool in the box to complement mass transit”, Arnd Bätzner from Batzner Metropolitan said.

GECKO will therefore support authorities in transitioning to the new mobility paradigm by means of recommendations and other tools regarding regulation and governance.

Key outputs of GECKO will include:

• An analysis of existing regulatory schemes and governance models
• Guidelines for new governance models
• A regulatory framework dashboard enabling the assessment of the social, economic and safety impacts of regulation

GECKO is led by the international public transport association, UITP, and involves several key stakeholder organisations (Polis, IRU and CORTE) as well as research and knowledge centres and businesses.

For further information about GECKO, contact the project coordinator Yannick Bousse.