COVID-19 has had a great impact on the field of mobility, as well as on all other fields of society. This impact has been brought by the changes that have occurred in people's lives and social structures. For example, a drastic decline in demand for passenger transport has been observed, meanwhile freight transport, particularly door-to-door parcel delivery services has grown sharply. The circumstances of mobility may not return to what they were prior to the pandemic if people's lifestyles remain unchanged even after the pandemic is resolved. In this paper, I summarize the results of the discussion on the ideal future of mobility and the direction to aim for in light of the changes of the times from the viewpoint of academia.

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Green Slow Mobility is a small transport service that utilizes electric vehicles with a top speed of less than 20 km/h. The service started in the 2010s and has its roots in Wajima and Gunma. There is a great deal of difficulty in running golf carts used in golf courses on public roads, and in this paper, I will present the history of efforts made in Wajima for the project, the thoughts of the people involved, and the advantages of the small electric low-speed car that was later named Green Slow Mobility. In addition, I will present subsequent movements that have been made and describe the outlook for the future.

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Based in Kamikoani Road Station in Kamikoani Village, Kitaakita District, Akita Prefecture, which is a mountainous area, an automatic driving service using the framework of the Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP project) carried out by the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, has been implemented since November 30, 2019. The service was implemented after a demonstration experiment was provided. We will report on its background and the current status of its introduction.

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“Transporting things” is a basic economic activity, and logistics is sometimes known as the physical internet since it is so closely related to infrastructure. However, with the decrease in the working-age population and the increase in delivery volume, the load placed on the sites at the end of the supply chain has become extremely high. This paper discusses the development, demonstration, and practical application of indoor delivery robots, which are expected to play an active role in solving these social issues, and outdoor delivery robots, which have been attracting attention in recent years, especially on public roads. We will also introduce the benefits to stakeholders and the attainment of social acceptance, which are necessary for continuous business as a transportation solution.

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Until now, the challenge of having to share restricted space on roads has been addressed by a diverse group of stakeholders, with people offering their expertise to solve the problem. In recent years, new modalities of mobility have been emerged, and the manner in which spaces are shared will need to be explored. With regard to the concept of “shared space” that was conceived from the idea of achieving safe roads through minimizing traffic rules, eliminating the segregation of pedestrians and vehicles, and improving attentiveness to subjects of transportation, this paper looks at the circumstances surrounding shared spaces on roads, while looking at case studies where pedestrian safety and comfort have been prioritized on a wide scale.

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In Europe, an existing framework de facto considers human-powered kick scooters as toys, and e-scooters as vehicles. Overall, traffic rules for bicycles tend to be applied to e-scooters to a large extent. E-scooter sharing services are facing issues involving illegal parking and uneven distribution within the city. Local governments tackle these issues by establishing a monitoring system, and also by imposing obligation on operators to remove illegally parked scooters at their own costs. In the context of urban mobility planning, further research needs to be conducted to understand how e-scooters will substitute other transport modes such as walking, and how they will affect targets of mobility policy.

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In order to investigate safety concerns about new electric mobility, an analysis is carried out focusing on helmets, riding position, vertical slopes, front and rear lights, and whether the operator has a license with regard to accidents involving bicycles, motorized bicycles, wheelchairs, and other modes of transportation. A number of factors are presented including helmets being highly effective in high-speed collisions, the changes in accident occurrence rate by vertical slope according to vehicle type, lack of visibility of front and rear lights, and the high rate of compliance with bicycle riding methods by persons with a driver’s license. With this in consideration, a broad range of issues are inferred regarding the safety of new electric mobility.

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With the aging population in Japan, people’s values regarding mobility are changing, and the introduction of Green Slow Mobility (GSM), which was initiated as a policy by the government in 2018, has not been sufficiently verified academically regarding its social acceptability and social effects. In this paper, after systematically organizing domestic case studies of GSM, we conduct a survey in Kiryu City, Gunma Prefecture, to analyze the social acceptability of GSM from the viewpoint of PSC criteria for considering and managing roads as social spaces. In addition to examining the social effects of introducing GSM in terms of changes in users’ lives and urban development, the structure in which the use of GSM brings about social effects is verified using structural equation modeling.

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Since electric kickboards have a similar size and speed to bicycles, users may not follow traffic rules and change their traveling position according to the road environment. In this study, we conducted a questionnaire survey and analyzed the relationship between the desired traffic position using an electric kickboard and external factors such as individual attributes and road traffic conditions. On roads with a physical boundary between the sidewalk and roadway, it was shown that the wider the road shoulder width is, the more users chose to use the shoulder or roadway. For roads without a boundary, users selected the roadway when there was high pedestrian traffic, and chose the shoulder when there was high vehicle traffic. In addition, the relationship between means of transportation in daily life and the trends concerning traffic position choice was clarified.

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