New Light Vehicles’ Solutions for Active, Sustainable, and Inclusive Urban Mobility of Older Users

Among the actions planned to achieve the goal of the European Green Deal to become climate neutral by 2050 is accelerating the transition to sustainable and smart mobility [1]. The action indicates the need to put the user at the center and to reduce emissions by 90% by 2050 through the development of multimodal, automated, and connected mobility using clean and sustainable energy sources.While the transition to electric cars enables the reduction of fossil fuel consumption and urban pollution, on the other hand it does not alleviate urban traffic and parking problems, and presents a major challenge regarding the recycling of end-of-life vehicles and batteries.For this reasons micro-mobility solutions, which include a wide range of light vehicles such as e-bikes and e-scooters (shared and personal), represent an alternative with great potential capable of contributing to the creation of healthy and smart environments, balancing a low demand for physical effort with a substantial environmental benefit [2]. However, many studies highlight how these solutions are currently attractive primarily to a younger target [3] and within specific usage scenarios related to the tourism and recreational context [3] and last-mile connections for commuters [2]. Due to reduced physical performance, in fact, ease of travel by bicycle can be an insurmountable barrier for older users [4]. The same barrier also recurs in the case of e-scooters, for which skepticism and risk perception are even higher, mainly due to the balance control skills that the vehicle requires when being used [3], as well as road safety issues and inadequate infrastructure for micro-mobility.This means that a large share of users remain excluded from the solutions currently available, with a strong negative impact on the development of sustainable mobility, considering the fact that current demographic trends highlight the progressive increase in the number of elderly citizens in many countries around the world. Promoting micro-mobility as the most efficient urban and peri-urban mobility system in terms of emissions, energy and material consumption therefore implies a paradigm shift in the design of light vehicles, with a design for inclusion approach that overcomes the main issues limiting their deployment and leads to new functional solutions to better meet the needs of older user groups [5]. The paper presents some research results in this topic, which, starting from the identification of emerging needs and trends in urban and peri-urban mobility of older users with different lifestyles, investigates new scenarios of use, aimed at the inclusion of a wide range of users, in the development of light vehicles and the study of potential offered by artificial intelligence to make vehicles and people autonomous.With the aim of improving people's ability to move autonomously, sustainably and inclusively, three design solutions of light vehicles for people and goods, inclusive and unisex, were developed, all oriented at promoting an active and healthy lifestyle, and improving safety, independence and efficiency in user mobility at urban level. The projects presented in this paper were selected among the concepts that emerged within various Design Sprint sessions held with young designers and in one case developed for participation in a Horizon-CL5-2023-D5-01 project. References[1] European Commission (2019). Communication from the commission to the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, The European Green Deal. [2] Zaffagnini, T., Lelli, G., Fabbri, I., & Negri, M. (2022). Innovative street furniture supporting electric micro-mobility for active aging. In Internet of Things for Human-Centered Design: Application to Elderly Healthcare (pp. 313-327). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.[3] Bozzi, A. D., & Aguilera, A. (2021). Shared E-scooters: A review of uses, health and environmental impacts, and policy implications of a new micro-mobility service. Sustainability, 13(16), 8676.[4] Van Cauwenberg, J., De Bourdeaudhuij, I., Clarys, P., De Geus, B., & Deforche, B. (2019). E-bikes among older adults: benefits, disadvantages, usage and crash characteristics. Transportation, 46, 2151-2172.[5] Phannil, N., & Jettanasen, C. (2021). Design of a personal mobility device for elderly users. Journal of Healthcare Engineering, 2021, 1-22.