Safe and sustainable urban mobility
We develop and research smart, innovative measures and integrated solutions for the domains of mobility, liveability, and safety. To this end, we deploy multidisciplinary knowledge and new technology, including IT technology.
Pressure on mobility, liveability, and safety
The majority of the world’s population lives in urbanised areas. Many different activities come together there, including living, working, and recreation. These drive the demand for movements of people. Combining these activities puts greater pressure on sustainable mobility, safety, and liveability in cities and their surroundings.
This leads to complex problems. Among other things, the Netherlands is becoming gridlocked and cities are becoming inaccessible. Calls for greater investment in rail and roads are getting louder and there’s an increasing emphasis on devising measures and integrated solutions.
Sustainable urban mobility and safety
Our expertise group aims to help national and international governments and the business community with:
- design
- implementation
- monitoring and evaluation
- timely adjustment and scaling up of smart innovative measures in the physical environment, including the living environment.
The goal is to find the optimum balance between the needs of users (workers, residents, travellers, leisure travellers, entrepreneurs, emergency services) and the quality of the living environment.
We collaborate a great deal with other TNO departments and are therefore closely aligned with the TNO strategy. Knowledge is at the core of the expertise group. We apply this knowledge through data and models for quantitative analyses. From the data and models, we extract decision information that we display with good-quality visualisations generated by tools. This enables us, for instance, to show the effects of mobility measures on liveability. For example, we provide decision-supporting information to governments and the business community (especially industry).
In our tools, we make our knowledge accessible in a transparent, fast, and visually appealing way. A prominent example of our tools is the Urban Strategy platform for integrated urban planning.
Get inspired
Recap Automotive Week 2023
At this year’s Automotive Week there were over 1500 attendees. 50 industry experts shared their insights and there were more than 30 live demonstrations to show the future of mobility. TNO is one of the partners of the AW2023 held at the Automotive Campus in Helmond from 16-19 April 2023.


Urban strategy: Local digital twins for sustainable mobility and liveable cities
How the Digital Twin Urban Strategy can help tackle urbanisation challenges and meet societal goals at the same time.


TNO pleads for getting innovations to the road quicker
With the current state of innovation, we can move around much smarter, safer, and cleaner. Implementation is often the limiting factor. This threatens to jeopardize both economic and social goals. TNO advocates more focus on implementing innovations, including testing in a realistic, practical environment.


Demo’s Automotive Week: the future of automated logistics
During Automotive Week at the Automotive Campus in Helmond, TNO will be giving three promising presentations that give a practical demonstration of how automated transport solutions can make our logistics more safer, efficient and smarter.


Time setters: Urban Strategy maps bottlenecks in city expansion
In this episode, we talk to time setter Jeroen Borst, Cluster Manager Societal Impact, about how the Urban Strategy tool maps the impact of urban expansion on mobility.

