Redefining Urban Connectivity: The Strategic Role of Mobility Hubs
As cities face growing pressures from urbanization, climate goals, and infrastructure constraints, Urban Mobility Hubs (UMHs) have emerged as pivotal instruments to reshape how people and goods move. Far from being just transfer points, modern UMHs are strategically located nodes that integrate shared mobility, land use planning, and public transportation—enabling seamless, sustainable, and efficient journeys.
The evolution of these hubs is tightly linked to broader objectives: reducing car dependency, expanding multimodal accessibility, and promoting equity in urban mobility. Global implementations in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh reflect a common vision—but achieving this vision requires advanced analytical tools.
This is where Operations Research (OR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) come into play.
My research contributes a novel perspective through the development of Hub Line Location Problems (HLLP) that incorporate elastic demand—acknowledging that user choices depend not only on infrastructure but also on travel times and service availability. Unlike static models, this approach captures the dynamic response of users to new services, helping decision-makers to:
Design efficient hub-and-spoke networks that adapt to user behavior
Minimize total travel time while considering accessibility trade-offs
Support long-term demand shifts in both passengers and freight systems
Moreover, urban logistics stands to benefit. Mobility hubs, when designed strategically, can host micro-depots for last-mile delivery or enable modal shifts in urban freight. Integrating demand modeling into hub planning allows cities to respond better to e-commerce growth and congestion challenges.
In this emerging field, rigorous optimization and data-driven design are not optional—they are essential. By aligning infrastructure investments with behavioral insights and mathematical modeling, Urban Mobility Hubs can become not just the backbone of transportation, but catalysts for livable, resilient cities.
🔍 Curious to dive deeper?
These ideas are explored in academic papers where I apply advanced optimization models—particularly Hub Line Location Problems with elastic demand—to support mobility hub planning under real-world constraints.
The models capture user responsiveness to new routes, helping design more adaptive, accessible, and sustainable transport systems.
📄 Explore my contributions here: Google Scholar – Brenda Cobeña