Sustainable mobility at the ZHAW School of Engineering

Initial situation and objectives

With its sustainability strategy, the ZHAW aims to ensure sustainable university operations. This includes raising awareness and training employees and students with regard to sustainable development. (Everyday) mobility and especially commuting are particularly relevant factors when it comes to a paradigm shift within the change in behaviour towards more sustainability.

Despite changes in working methods and lifestyles, in which traditional offices are increasingly being replaced by mobile or private workplaces and flexible working time models are becoming more and more common, commuter flows are increasing steadily, especially in urban areas of Switzerland. The consequences are traffic jams and congested public transport at peak times as well as increasing noise and air pollution. All this is associated with high economic, ecological and health (consequential) costs. These developments require a rethinking of mobility strategies in order to reduce the negative effects of today's mobility systems.

Against this background, the ZHAW SoE is also called upon to create framework conditions that will lead to an improvement in the traffic situation or to a rethinking and break away from known mobility patterns and, overall, to sustainable mobility. The aim of the project is therefore to survey, analyse and visualise the mobility behaviour of employees and students at the ZHAW SoE as comprehensively as possible and to draw up a CO2 balance sheet for this purpose. This should provide a broad inventory that can identify potential opportunities for optimisation.

Project schedule

WP1 - Basic preparation and development of a procedural concept

• In a first step, available basics are worked up and the planned procedure concept is further refined.

WP2 - Preparation and implementation of employee and student survey

• The planned survey will record the mobility behaviour of employees and students when commuting to the ZHAW SoE and when moving between the different ZHAW locations in Winterthur. The survey will focus on the choice of means of transport, transport purposes, times (travel times, points in time) and length of commuting routes, as well as the reasons behind their own mobility decisions.

WP3 - Evaluation of the survey, visualisation of the results with GIS and CO2 calculations

• After the evaluation of the results with statistical data analyses as well as a visualisation of the results with geographic information systems (GIS), a CO2 calculation of mobility at the SoE will be made using life cycle assessment data from databases such as ecoinvent or Mobitool and the main sources will be identified.

WP4 - Derivation of recommendations for action for the ZHAW SoE

• In a final step, recommendations for action and approaches to solutions are derived which will lead to an improvement in the mobility situation at the ZHAW SoE and additionally support the goals and basic measures for reducing CO2 emissions through mobility as formulated in the Green Impact Book (GIB).