Question: I always knew traveling and commuting in cities was hard and harmful to the environment but I was never really sure what I and the general public should be doing to minimalize all the difficulties so I was wondering, what are people like you doing to spread awareness about what we should be doing to help improve traffic and public transport?

Lara Codeca answered on 25 Nov 2020:

Hello Rory@skerriescc,

Your question is a good one. 😀
What I do touches mainly three fronts, and they do overlap with each other.
First and foremost, we are running city-scale mobility simulations to try to find a reasonable solution to the different transportation modes usage and requirements.
Then, we get in contact with both the industry and the local/national government to partner up and see what can be done for real.
Finally, it’s what I’m doing here now. We need to talk with people, answer questions, provide explanations about why it’s so hard to fix these things. Talking with the people that have actually to move around, we learn about real problems that we may not have considered, and we can come up with more compromises and trade-off to test on our simulations and solutions.

My personal opinion is that we are in a situation in which we are in a hurry to fix the future.
We need sustainable solutions for the mobility of the future. We need both the people that are going to reinvent the mobility that we are going to see in 50+ years. Still, we need the ones that are going to try to find a compromise between the optimal solution that is not feasible, and a better option that is not perfect but paves the way to the future.

Thanks for this question!