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How We Measure
Urban Mobility

The 2023 edition of the Urban Mobility Readiness Index provides an in-depth analysis of 65 global cities. These cities are geographically diverse, representing six regions – North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Africa. They range from sprawling megacities like Tokyo and Delhi, to more compact cities such as Oslo and Washington D.C., to fast-developing metropolises like Nairobi. They were selected because of their distinct mobility challenges and the varied solutions they are pursuing. They understand the importance of mobility and serve as economic epicenters for their regions, making their efforts to improve mobility vital to the growth of much larger areas. The cities also were chosen because data is available to assess, compare, and track the evolution of their mobility capabilities.

The fifth edition of the index includes five new cities – Copenhagen, Manama, Melbourne, Monterrey, and Rome — as part of the ongoing effort to broaden the research and ensure representation of a diverse population.

In developing the UMR Index, we began with a vision of what cities need to be striving for – the characteristics that businesses, consumers, and policymakers consider indispensable today and will pursue a decade from now. That approach continued to inspire the two sub-indices: The Sustainable Mobility sub-index groups compares a subset of metrics such as the strength of the multi-modal network, public transit usage, electric vehicle (EV) ownership and infrastructure, share of pedestrians, and the cycling infrastructure. The Public Transit sub-index considers metrics such as the transit commute speed, public transit station density, strength of the multimodal network, and the public transit utilization rate.

From that vision comes action. For the fifth edition of the UMR index, we included recommendations to improve sustainability and public transit systems that are unique to each city. Some, like London and San Francisco, could build additional public transit stations, while others like London and Munich and London and Singapore can expand EV charging networks. This new dimension provides actionable tool cities can use to improve their performance.

The criteria are focused on internal discussions and conversations with leading professionals and experts, the research team arrived at the six key attributes of future mobility ecosystems:

Integrated: Mobility should be intermodal, one-stop services that provide seamless travel, commutes, and delivery experiences.

Accessible: Mobility should be easy to use, affordable, convenient, efficient, and available to everyone.

Sustainable: Systems and solutions should not degrade the environment or health of city residents and can even offer economic benefits to them.

Innovative: Cities should encourage innovation and take advantage of the latest technologies, reinterpreting them to fit their needs.

Collaborative: Municipalities need to create coalitions with private-sector enterprises both large legacy players and start-ups – so they can work together to shape the future.

Resilient: As disasters and other risks challenge urban mobility resilience, it is important that cities emphasize

Leading cities in the mobility revolution are likely to expand their public transportation modes, availability and linkages; provide safe roads, reliable services, and employment opportunities; enable emerging technologies, like electric and autonomous vehicles; emphasize digitization and sustainability; bolster their risk preparedness; and align municipal policies, regulations, and budgets accordingly.

Ranking dimensions

Along with the 2023 UMR Index, our results also display a sub-index on Sustainable Mobility. It is based on the following 16 KPIs drawn from the UMR Index:

Sustainable Mobility

The Urban Mobility Readiness Index uses five basic dimensions to rank the 65 cities – infrastructure, social impact, market attractiveness, system efficiency, and innovation. These five dimensions, in turn, are comprised of 56 metrics, – key performance indicators – that collectively identify which cities are ready to excel in meeting future mobility challenges.

  • Air quality
  • Car-free zones
  • Car ownership moderation
  • Climate-related losses
  • Cycling adoption
  • Cycling infrastructure
  • Direct EV incentivization
  • Disaster-risk informed development
  • Electric charging station density
  • Electric vehicle market share in sales
  • Government investment in charging stations
  • Noise and light pollution restraint
  • Public transit utilization
  • Rail network
  • Strength of multimodal network
  • Walkability

Public Transit

The Public Transit sub-index is based on the following 13 KPIs drawn from the UMR Index:

  • Autonomous transit in operation
  • Diversity of public transit modes
  • Length of walk to public transit
  • Multimodal app maturity
  • Public transit affordability
  • Public transit operating hours
  • Public transit station density
  • Public transit utilization
  • Rail network
  • Share of time in public transit
  • Strength of multimodal network
  • Transit commute speed
  • Transit estimated time of arrival

2023 Index Methodology

The UMR Index uses five basic dimensions to rank the cities—infrastructure, social impact, market attractiveness, systems efficiency, and innovation. Below, find the 56 metrics that fall under these five dimensions—KPIs that identify which cities will excel in mobility.

With the addition of five new cities to the 2023 Index, the year-on-year movement in rankings has been adjusted to accurately reflect each city’s net change in ranking. Research was completed as of August 2023, based on various sets of data that may not reflect more recent developments.

Index Structure and Reliability

In the process of constructing the UMR Index, the KPIs that make up each dimension have been assigned a weight based on their relative importance to the ultimate task of building urban mobility ecosystems that can thrive in the future. The UMR Index gives extra weight to factors that capture the ability of a city to become a future leader and ensure rankings reflect performance prospects rather than the competitive status quo.

Weights of the KPIs were determined based on discussions that our UMR Index team conducted with a wide range of experts including urban planners, traffic managers, transportation finance specialists, and mobility technology executives as well as data collected by the Oliver Wyman Forum and the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley. As part of the construction and testing of the UMR Index, convex optimization techniques were used to understand the proper weight structure needed to benchmark cities against each other. The extensive testing yielded results similar to the weights chosen by our team, reinforcing our confidence in the UMR Index composition and metrics’ weighting.

References

    Authors

    Guillaume Thibault, Matthieu De Clercq, Fabian Brandt, Andreas Nienhaus and Alexandre Bayen.

    This report would not have been possible without the contributions of Sophia Bruton, Tom Buerkle, Ludovic Cartigny, Lisa Chen, Elena Chiappa, Julia Chudzik, Ollie Cordeiro, Liliana Diaz, Tara Donston, Emilio El Asmar, Jodie Gadd, Wai Leong Hoh, Dustin Irwin, Brian Kim, Dan Kleinman, Anna Kulinich, Adam Mehring, Jilian Mincer, Laura Reid, Chloe Rosenberg, Shams Rzayeva, Ozzie Santana, Adrien Slimani, Mattias Sundell, and Weronika Talaj.


    Contact

    For more information, contact us at OWForum@oliverwyman.com.