It is time for multimodality!

The topics of multimodality, passenger experience, or creating a seamless mobility system within Europe that meets the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement are high on the agenda of shaping the future European transport system. The Modus project identified and assessed (future) drivers for passenger demand and supply of joint air-rail mobility in terms of their impact on passenger modal choice – across different future mobility scenarios, including a pre-pandemic recovery, a significant short-haul shift from air to rail, and traffic growth with strong technological support.

In order to assess the multimodal performance across these scenarios, a number of experiments have been designed to evaluate the impact on key (multimodal) performance indicators, including door-to-door (D2D) travel times, average flight waiting times, flight delays, or gate-to-gate CO₂ emissions. Assuming a shift from air to rail on connections below 500 km, and only for city pairs with available high-speed rail links, the analysis in Modus reveals a potential shift between
2 % and 3 % of the expected air demand in 2040. On the air transport network level, the Modus modelling approach reveals a potential reduction in flight delays, ranging from 10 % in the short-haul scenario up to 23 % in the highest traffic growth scenario, or a reduction in network D2D travel times by up to 8 %.

This approach and the respective insights help gain a better understanding of multimodal traveller requirements, air-rail modal choice, and advancing and implementing models to better depict passengers’ D2D journeys; to be used by policy makers or transport providers to assess impacts on capacities, predictability, and the environment, across scenarios and for multi-modal journeys.