How transport connections shape everyday journeys: MobiliseHER and GEMINI

A trip across the city can involve a bus, a ferry, a shared vehicle and a walk between them. Transport plans often describe each service separately, but people experience all of them as one journey. If the connection is difficult to find, uncomfortable to wait for or hard to navigate, even a reliable service may not be enough to make the whole trip work.

This is a question that appears in two areas of UEMI’s work. MobiliseHER looks at how women and other groups experience urban mobility in India, while GEMINI tests ways to connect public transport with other mobility services in European cities. The projects have different settings and goals, but both offer reasons to pay closer attention to the moments between services.

A connection is also a place

In Fort Kochi, buses and ferries are part of many people’s journeys. Moving between them involves finding the right route, navigating the surrounding streets and sometimes waiting before continuing the trip. Through MobiliseHER, UEMI looks at these everyday experiences to better understand what can make urban mobility safer and more accessible, particularly for women.

Looking at the site as a connection, rather than simply as three nearby services, changes the questions we ask. Can someone tell where to go after getting off the bus? What is the route to the ferry like for a person carrying shopping or travelling with a child? Where can people wait, and how comfortable do they feel doing so? The answers depend on the physical space and on the experiences of the people who use it.

These details matter for many travellers, though they may affect people differently. MobiliseHER’s work in Kochi draws attention to women’s experiences of safety and access, as well as to the needs of people whose journeys are often given less consideration in conventional transport planning.

Making different services useful together

GEMINI approaches connections from another direction. Its Mobility Living Labs are exploring how shared mobility, walking, cycling and other options can work alongside public transport. In the Greater Copenhagen area, for example, the project is looking at multimodal hubs that connect public transport with shared services in a peri-urban setting.

A shared vehicle may help someone reach a station that is too far to walk to, but its usefulness depends on more than its availability. The person needs to know where to find it, how the service works and whether the connection fits their journey. Those questions become especially relevant outside dense city centres, where travel options may be further apart.

Testing services in real places helps GEMINI examine how these connections work for users, including where an idea that makes sense on paper needs to be adjusted. For UEMI, the experiences from the Living Labs also provide material that can be shared with other cities facing similar decisions.

MobiliseHER and GEMINI are working in different contexts, so there is no single solution to take from Kochi to a European city, or the other way around. What connects them is the need to understand a trip from the traveller’s point of view.