Public Space & Safety Contribution — pricing urban street space by vehicle footprint and harm

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Title

Public Space & Safety Contribution — pricing urban street space by vehicle footprint and harm

(Falls das Feld kürzer sein muss: "Public Space & Safety Contribution — a charge for urban street space")

Short description (248 Zeichen)

Building a consortium for DUT 2026 (15minC, Topic 2): a charge for urban street space, priced by vehicle footprint and harm, revenue earmarked for walking, cycling and public transport. Seeking an economist, a legal scholar, a city and an employer.

Full description

Cities face two pressures at once. The cost of maintaining street infrastructure and adapting it to a changing climate is rising, while the revenue that used to come from motorised traffic — fuel duty above all — is falling as the fleet electrifies. At the same time, automated ride-hailing is arriving in European cities, and every empty kilometre it drives occupies street space that no one is paying for.

We propose a Public Space & Safety Contribution: a charge for the use of urban street space, set for each vehicle by the space it occupies and the harm it causes — mass, footprint, direct vision, speed and occupancy — rather than by ownership or fuel type. The revenue is legally earmarked for walking, cycling and public transport, so the instrument funds the alternatives it creates demand for. One option we want to test is that those who pay the contribution receive an annual public transport pass, which changes the political arithmetic of the measure considerably.

For the DUT 2026 call this sits in 15minC, Topic 2: the contribution is precisely the kind of pricing and incentive structure the topic asks for, and it connects employer-side commuting decisions with the street space those decisions consume.

What the project would deliver

• an economic model of the contribution: pricing logic, revenue projection, distributional effects, and the open question of whether cheap flat-fare transport displaces walking and cycling

• a legal pathway analysis: what national and EU law permits, where earmarking is possible, and which competences a city actually holds

• a vehicle assessment method that translates mass, footprint and direct vision into a comparable figure

• a living-lab design with one or more partner cities, including acceptance research

• an employer-side strand on commuting and workplace parking

Who we are looking for

• an economist or economics institute for the pricing and revenue work

• a legal scholar in transport, tax or municipal law

• a city or municipal authority — participation as an unfunded cooperation partner is entirely possible

• an employer or employers' network for the Topic 2 strand

• researchers in public health, acceptance research and automated mobility are welcome

**Status
**Conversations are under way with Malmö University / K2 in Sweden, Planum in Graz and the Berlin Institute for Social Research. A full research design of around 100 pages exists and can be seen here: https://holistic-governance.org/stewardship-governance/research-project/.
The pre-proposal deadline is 17 November 2026, so we are looking to have the consortium in place during October.