IVT News Channel (EN)

Call for papers for the upcoming Swiss transportation scientists' and spatial planners' annual conference. 

Guest lecture with Dr Raphaël Ancel.

The lab’s ability to test the effects of policy decisions is already proving valuable. Moreover, those early results unveiled where shared mobility works well or where gaps in PT accessibility persist.

The number of electrically powered bicycles on Swiss roads is growing steadily. E-bikes are changing leisure and commuter traffic. The University of Basel and ETH Zurich have conducted studies in order to investigate how. In particular, the results suggest that fast e-bikes (up to 45 km/h) do have the potential to attract motorists to two-wheelers. An important factor in this is a well-developed cycle network.

IVT Seminar with Professor Otto Anker Nielsen from the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby.

Public dissertation presentation by Lucas Meyer de Freitas on modeling behavioral change and impacts of an E-Bike City.

Lukas Ballo receives the Carl Pirath Prize 2025 from the Deutsche Verkehrswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft e. V. (DVWG) for his dissertation about the E-Bike City project.

This event is aimed at professionals in the fields of urban planning, mobility, landscape architecture, urban climate and socio-spatial development in relation to the ‘Aufbruch in den Stadtraum Hauptbahnhof 2050’ project in Zurich.

Colloquium with Jillian Anable, Ralph Buehler, Susan Handy, Eva Heinen, Robin Lovelace, Jeppe Rich, Yoram Shiftan and others

Inaugural lecture by Professor Eva Heinen

IVT Seminar on experimental decision-making through smart mobility platforms with Professor Akimasa Fujiwara from Hiroshima University, Japan.

An international conference on automatic train operation in relation to sustainability was held at ETH Zurich in December 2024. The aim was to present as many perspectives as possible in order to provide a broad overview of the topic. To make this possible, nine speakers from the fields of rail transport, industry and science gave presentations mostly in English. A poster session presentation provided an opportunity for expert discussions, eventually. 

Florian Fuchs from the  Transport Systems (TS) research group received a honorable mention in this year's student paper competition, together with his co-authors Benardo Martin-Iradi and Francesco Corman.

Dissertation presentation by Benjamin Gramsch-Calvo on modeling and policy implications of peers influence on mobility beahvior.

IVT Seminar with Professor Frauke Behrendt who is Associate Professor in Transitions to Sustainable Mobility at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Elisabeth Brugger won the Best Student Paper Award with her paper Relations Between Objectives in Additional Train Scheduling written together with Dr Paola Pellegrini (Université Gustave Eiffel, France) and Professor Francesco Corman at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Rail Transportation (ICIRT 2025) in Beijing, China. 

E-bikes are changing leisure and commuter traffic. The University of Basel and ETH Zurich have conducted studies to find out exactly how. In particular, fast e-bikes (up to 45 km/h) have the potential to get car drivers onto two wheels, the studies suggested. 

In Christian Cohrs' podcast "The Passenger" with Catherine Elliot, the former project coordinator of the E-Bike City project provides an overview of how the use of individual modes of transport would shift and what it really takes to redesign urban transport for the future.

A city focussing on slow traffic modes - That is the vision of three factions in the St. Gallen city parliament.

Professor Ulrich Weidmann explains the criteria used to prioritise national infrastructure projects and what this prioritisation means for the upcoming political decision-making process.

Kevin Riehl's talk at D-BAUG's Meet&Share 2025

Kevin Riehl explains the advantages and limitations of the 80 km/h speed limit on Swiss motorways on SRF 10vor10.

Technical development is already well advanced among car manufacturers, but legal and ethical issues surrounding data protection and data utilisation remain a topic of discussion. Professor Emeritus Kay Axhausen explains why.

Annual Symposium of the Center for Sustainable Future Mobility (CSFM) at ETH Zurich.

IVT-Workshop with Zahra Saghian, Gerd Kortemeyer, Morteza Bagheri, Robert Reschke, Riccardo Fiorista and Jan Lordieck

Webinar on research-based methods that support planning projects for urban transformations using a toolkit developed at ETH.

The Traffic Engineering Group at ETH Zurich is launching the next innovative field experiment to observe cyclists' movement with drones in order to simulate mass bicycle traffic flow for Zurich.

The team from the Transport Systems (TS) research group won second place in the competition to solve the train dispatching problem. Congratulations!

IVT Seminar with Helge Hillnhütter, Vice Dean for Research at the Department of Architecture and Planning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

The lecture series on aviation is among the largest in Europe. Lecturer and initiator Peter Wild shares how it all began and how the teaching helps students bridge the gap to practical application. The series is part of the “Transportation Systems” specialization within the Master’s program in Civil Engineering.

Bavarian municipalities along the motorway will prohibit traffic passing through, in the event of traffic jams on the motorway. Researcher Kay Axhausen says: ‘There are other means to fight traffic congestion.’

Fast e-bikes often travel at speeds of over 30 km/h in Zurich, even in 30 km/h zones. An ETH study highlights conflicting goals and calls for new infrastructure solutions.

The plan for a transit fee is politically highly controversial, since this is intended to solve the Gotthard car congestion problem. Several experts see a discriminatory problem and a foreseeable escalation with the European Union.

Bernardo Martin-Iradi from the Transport Systems (TS) research group has been awarded the VeRoLog Doctoral Dissertation Prize 2023 at this year's EURO Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization conference in Trento.

Kevin Riehl from the Traffic Engineering research group (SVT) lends a hand wherever he can—it's his way of giving back to nature.

The results of the ETH E-Bike City project are currently making headlines in the media. The NZZ is once again polemicizing and doubting the implementation of ecological urban redevelopment.

Public dissertation presentation by Matej Jusup from the Transport Systems (TS) research group on how safe Mean-Field Reinforcement Learning and Mean-Field Bayesian Optimization can be applied in order to control AV's on a large scale (tens of thousands of vehicles) in real-time.

ETH Zurich has developed a concept for an E-Bike City where half of Zurich's road space is to be converted into wide cycle paths and car traffic would be massively restricted.

Kay Axhausen comes from Heidelberg and has been Professor for Transport Planning at ETH Zurich since 1999. His favourite mode of transport the bicycle.

Professor Kay Axhausen sees e-bikes as the cities' only answer to climate change. The expansion of public transport has its limits.

A group of researchers led by Professor Kay Axhausen is proposing the E-Bike City project as a solution for the city of Zurich, which is hardly practicable and involves allocating half of the current road space to bicycles and scooters with and without motors.

Professor Eva Heinen's interview about personal commute and general transport choices.

Driverless taxis are driving in the USA for almost a year now. Professor Kay Axhausen explains the situation in Europe and various possible uses for autonomous vehicles.

Ride your bicycles and pass through our experiment locations to help us collect data.

A full day of MATSim will be held in conjunction with the 13^th Symposium of the European Association for Research in Transportation (hEART 2025) in Munich.

Catherine Elliot won the Smart Pedal Pitch contest at the Velo-city Conference 2025 in Gdansk.

ETH Zurich researched how half of the transport space could be gained for bicycle-friendly urban planning for the past three years. Now, the conclusion has been drawn.

Daniel Heimgartner's public dissertation presentation

The final event of the E-Bike City project, which marks the culmination of an ambitious three-year D-BAUG lighthouse initiative, bringing together researchers from across the department.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) is working on a zeitgeist project: the E-Bike City Zurich. The global financial city is to become a global cycling city: 50 per cent of the current road space will be reserved for e-bikes, bicycles and e-scooters, and only 35 per cent for cars, which would increase the distances they travel by up to 30 per cent.