Modal Shift quantification
Status: in development, expected for january 2027
Estimating how many car trips an intermediate vehicle could realistically absorb, and what that would mean in emissions, energy, and material terms.
Why this
The whole project rests on a quantitative claim: that a meaningful fraction of car trips could be served by a much smaller vehicle, and that the resulting reduction in externalities is large enough to justify the effort.
Chapter 1 states that claim. This tool is how we find out whether it survives contact with real mobility data instead of remaining an assertion.
The specific question is narrow and answerable: given the actual distribution of trips (distance, purpose, chaining, territory, population density), what share falls inside the envelope this vehicle can serve, and what is displaced if it does?
How this connects to the real validation
This simulation produces an upper bound, not a measurement. It says how many trips could be substituted, which is a different and much easier question than how many would be.
The measurement is described in Chapter 2: real vehicles, real users who are not us, logbooks and GPS traces over weeks and months. That data is one of the thing this field lacks, and it is the thing we would like to contribute to.
The simulation’s real job is to tell us what to measure, and where the answer is most uncertain, so that when vehicles do go out on loan, the trials are pointed at the questions that matter.