The Centre for Transport Research and Innovation for People (TRIP) at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is playing a major role in an EU sustainable travel research project called EcoNav, which has been awarded €2.35m by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
The collaborative project is developing a real-time emissions and transport information tool aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, with the aim of influencing more sustainable travel patterns.
EcoNav, which stands for Ecological Aware Navigation – Usable Persuasive Trip Advisor for Reducing CO2 consumption, is being led by the independent Austrian research institute CURE, the Center for Usability Research & Engineering.
Eight entities are involved, including CURE, TCD, TomTom International, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Fluidtime Data Services GmbH, Telematix Software, ICCS – National Technical University of Athens and ITS Vienna Region.
Eco driving
The EcoNav project is working towards providing travellers with personalised mobile and web tools to help people plan more environmentally friendly trips.
TCD’s Dr Brian Caulfield is leading the research and the university’s research team will develop the real-time emissions model and manage field trials in Dublin, Vienna and the Netherlands.
Caulfield said Trinity would be playing a “pivotal role” in the EcoNav project.
“The results from TomTom trial of 2,000 users in the Netherlands will be analysed by the Trinity research team. This trial is one of the largest international trials conducted to examine the benefits of eco-driving,” he said