Concepts

The CONNECTING project assesses the environmental consequences of policies aiming at decreasing the use of conventional vehicles by cross-border commuters in favour of more diversified mobility: electric vehicles, multi-modal mobility, public transport and soft mobility. It takes a broad life cycle perspective and accounts for a whole range of environmental effects, beyond GHG emissions.

Specifically CONNECTING will:

• choose a ten year time frame starting 2015 and consistent with horizon of many different policy plans (carE, MODU, SMOT, etc.)
•  focus on the specific mobility challenges of French cross-border commuters working in Luxembourg city
• select and define pertinent mobility policy measures and through stakeholders’ involvement aim at defining and evaluating novel policies which have not been proposed so far
• develop a combined agent-based modelling (ABM) consequential life cycle assessment (C-LCA) approach unique in the LCA research community

An immediate impact of the CONNECTING project and results is that it allows that policy actions can be based on sound LCA results. The promise of this approach is that decisions are not based on one indicator e.g. GHG saving, but a full range of environmental impacts.

By stakeholder involvement CONNECTING goes beyond addressing proposed policy actions and scenarios, but seeks to be explorative by evaluating novel policies in a variety of economic and demographic contexts.

Finally CONNECTING provides a novel and unique simulation tool building the basis for further applications. While CONNECTING addresses mobility challenges of cross-border commuters, future applications could address mobility challenges for a larger population on a regional scale.