New Techniques to Promote Sustainable Mobility: Evaluation, Optimization and Behavioral Adaptation

Dear Colleagues,

We are organizing a Special Issue of Sustainability on new techniques to promote sustainable mobility. The venue is a peer-reviewed open-access journal that publishes articles and communications in the interdisciplinary area of sustainability. For detailed information on the journal, we refer you to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability.

The commitment to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for confining global climate change in the Paris Agreement and COP27 is driving urban managers and service providers worldwide to reduce emissions and energy consumption in the transport sector, which takes up around 30% of overall GHG emissions. In the past decades, the world has witnessed significant advances in transport electrification, connected automation, and shared mobility, which hold promising potential to facilitate transitions to sustainable mobility systems. Many techniques have already been implemented in reality. However, there are many theoretical, technical and practical issues that need to be addressed to put these new technologies or techniques to good use. To name a few, the emission and energy consumption of electric vehicles may be even larger than internal combustion engine vehicles if the electricity is mainly from thermal power in some regions and emissions in production/disposal are considered; shared mobility such as car-sharing and on-demand ride-hailing may result in more usage of passenger cars instead of public transits; the traffic safety in the mixed traffic with both connected and automated vehicle and human-driven vehicles may deteriorate due to divergent behavior between automated vehicles and human drivers.

Standing on the aforenoted backgrounds, the overall purpose of this Special Issue is to focus on: 1) evaluating the “real” impacts of implemented new transport systems (electric, connected and shared transport) based on emerging data resources, simulation and the combined way to identify key challenges and new issues; 2) novel approaches in terms of methodology frameworks, models, algorithms and case studies to optimize the new systems for improving efficiency, reducing emission and enhanced safety; and 3) diverse users’ behavior adaptation and response to new transport alternatives. These target at collective efforts from evaluation, optimization and user behavior to improve the sustainability of current transport systems, which contributes to climate actions.

We welcome systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual proposals, data analysis, framework establishment, method and algorithm development, experimental investigation, empirical cases, intervention studies and other types of studies under the scope described before, including both logistics and passenger transport. No preference will be attached to results being null, mixed, negative or positive. If you are uncertain about whether your paper fits into the scope of this Special Issue, please contact the Guest Editors.

This Special Issue is open to any subject area related to electric, shared and connected mobility. The listed keywords suggest just a few topics, but any relevant studies are also welcomed. 

Dr. Kun Gao
Dr. Bo Yu
Dr. Yang Liu
Dr. Jieyu Fan
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.