Last month I travelled to Bad Belzig. The context was the Residency for Movers programme of the Smart Village Mobility Campus. The idea of transferring the artist in residence concept to certain segments such as energy, mobility, health etc. is very charming and will be explored in more detail tomorrow evening at 19:05 on Deutschlandfunk Kultur's Zeitfragen programme. So listen in!
Das Programm wurde von Smart Village e.V. organisiert und die ‘Residence’ war im Co-Working Space CocoNat in Klein Glien. Ländlicher geht es nicht! Für mich war die Residency eine schöne Chance, Konzepte zum Verkehrsmittelnudging und zur Zielortwahl in einem sehr ländlichen Raum zu challengen. Residency, Nudging, Challengen: Zu Recht bat beim Kick-off eine ältere Frau aus Wiesenburg (~4.100 Einwohner), das Vorhaben verständlicher aufzubereiten. Therefore, a customer journey was planned (again, using the English term), which developed into a Punch and Judy journey at the final event - in other words, using hand puppets to communicate low-threshold concepts of accessibility in children's theatre.
However, the first step towards elaboration is to take a closer look - and there is a lot to discover on a small scale in the High Fläming, just like in its flower meadows. In the context of locations, the many centres of alternative living and working that may have emerged and continue to emerge in the slipstream of the famous ZEGG and the CCC outpost Alte Hölle are particularly noteworthy: the Exile Media Hub, the CocoNat, the KoDorf, and so on. All of these places are remote and endeavour to be more accessible with alternatives to private incineration. This can be as simple as shared station bikes with a combination lock, but can also include expensive charging technology that now shares a paddock with the train horses of the covered wagon (as with the CocoNat mobility station).
On the mobility side, in addition to rail transport, the local bus operator RegioBus, which is fighting the staff shortage with exemplary measures - such as its own bus driving school - should be emphasised. The same goes for the local community buses, which have been given a digital infrastructure thanks to the Smarte.Land.Regionen funding programme. There is also the district's own carpooling solution: the comby app. The bottom-up campaigns such as the carpooling benches in Wiesenburg/Mark, for example, are also noteworthy. Here, dedicated rural residents design great benches with destination signs, but often fail due to regulations on street lighting. Sharing is also slowly coming to the region: Nextbike offers a service between Potsdam and Bad Belzig, cargo bikes can be rented via Flotte Brandenburg, and P2P car sharing is old hat in the ZEGG municipality. Bad Belzig also has the Bad Belzig app, which integrates the city sat nav as an open source navigator.
I was particularly interested in revitalising the city centre of Bad Belzig. I wanted to develop exploratory solutions based on local public transport services that would meet with a high level of approval from the more than 50 independent location operators. The goal was the prototypical implementation of an app with an incentive-based lock-in concept for the city centre. The residency programme proved to be a veritable treasure trove of approaches that could bring location partners and mobility services closer together if scaled up - if they really wanted to. The willingness of the location operators in the city centre area was ascertained as part of the ‘door-to-door cleaning’.
The points of interest (POIs) are - even extremely - satisfied with their location and don't really want to change anything. However, this also means neither fewer car parking spaces nor necessarily more.
The most popular mobility-related measure in the list of 13 mobility ideas was a free public transport day. This option was rated just as highly as measures from city centre and online marketing.
In addition to these activities, the POI data from common sources were compared, accessibility areas were determined according to the main modes of transport and volume analyses of transport demand were calculated. The results are still to be published.
Catchment