The PhD study will be a part of the COMETS project (Co-Management of Energy and Transport Systems). The aim of COMETS is to develop a decision support system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions within the Danish transport sector, and ultimately moving towards a transportation sector free of fossil fuels. COMETS is a collaboration between DTU Management, DTU Transport, Roskilde University, and other Danish, Irish and Italian partners. It is financed by Det strategiske forskningsråd, now Innovationsfonden.

Roskilde University has responsibility to do research on how long term trends and ‘game changers’ are influencing the transport system in a quantitative form that can feed into the decision support system. The PhD is a part of this, focusing on how changes in localization of people and jobs influence transport demand.

In addition to demographic shifts (e.g., urbanization, densification of neighborhoods and cities versus sprawl, localization of people and jobs, etc.) and policy landscapes (e.g., zoning restrictions, taxes, subsidies, etc.), there may also be an interaction with technological innovations (e.g., electric cars, autonomous vehicles, e-commuting, etc.), trends also studied within the COMETS project.

Methodologically, this project will map and categorize physical planning tools based on international comparisons (literature and field work study tours) and estimate the potential effects in a Danish context of the relevant instruments. Thus, while the geographical and temporal scope is expected to be broad in identifying and studying such trends, ultimately, the PhD student will be part of developing quantitative parameters that can feed into the decision support system for Denmark.

An important part of COMETS is the interaction with external experts, citizens and policy makers through workshops and otherwise. Organizing and extracting information from these events will be a part of the PhD project.

Further details:
http://www.ruc.dk