C2CBridge aims to explore alternatives to private cars for commuting between urban and rural areas with a user-centered public transport service. Using an iterative approach, the intention is to develop sustainable, scalable, and transferable solutions that meet people’s mobility needs. The focus is on services with autonomous, cooperative, and electrically powered on-demand shared taxis that can accommodate up to four people, a wheelchair, a stroller, and luggage. Intelligent, modular mobility hubs are intended to make the interchange between the new transport system and the already established public transport system as attractive as possible. With the help of immersive visualizations, both the vehicles and the supporting infrastructure will be made tangible so that citizens and other stakeholders can experience them. To this end, transport research methods are combined with scientific product development methods. This offers the opportunity to analyze and refine the requirements and acceptance criteria for both vehicles and infrastructure.

In parallel, the project analyzes the mobility needs of citizens using various survey methods, in particular to identify social and spatial differences. This involves using quantitative methods from transport planning and transport behavior research as well as qualitative methods from the social sciences, geography, and urban planning. The goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the mobility needs and practices of people in different life situations and different types of areas.

The work of ITAS focuses on demand, acceptance, and impact research. The empirical core is a comprehensive interview study with citizens in different spatial contexts in and around Karlsruhe. It examines how new mobility services fit into people’s daily routines and what changes in mobility behavior the services might lead to. In addition, the results will be discussed with some of the respondents in workshops and focus groups to further optimize the design of the service offerings. In this way, the study will provide practical conclusions for the concrete design of automated mobility services that enable sustainable end-to-end transportation between the city and its surroundings.

The project is embedded in the German Centre for Future Mobility (Deutsches Zentrum Mobilität der Zukunft, DZM), of which Karlsruhe, along with Hamburg, Annaberg-Buchholz, and Minden, is one of four branches. It is coordinated by the research cluster KAMO: Karlsruhe Mobility, which has been pooling the expertise in mobility research of the KIT, the FZI Research Centre for Information Technology, Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (HKA), and the four Karlsruhe-based Fraunhofer Institutes since 2016.

As part of the project, online surveys were conducted in Marxzell and Waldbronn between June and November 2025. The goal of these surveys was to understand which modes of transportation are used for which purposes, what activities take place within the municipality of Waldbronn, and for which activities respondents leave their place of residence. A brief summary of the survey results can be found in the summary report (in German), or you can access the detailed research reports from Marxzell and Waldbronn.

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