Our motivation

How should mobility be designed to enable a good life while protecting the environment and climate? This question is at the heart of the research of the T3 Transportation Think Tank A sustainable future with liveable urban and rural areas, less environmental impacts but more traffic safety, and mitigation of the climate crisis can only be achieved through a change in mobility.

Our work contributes to creating more evidence for the potentials of sustainable mobility and to developing recommendations for action, based on scientific facts. A special focus of our scientific work is the role of bicycles for the transition of transport and mobility.

Our team

We are a think tank working on facilitating the transformation of transport. We work independently and transparently. In our research, we adhere to the German Research Foundation’s guidelines to ensure good scientific practice. Our common passion is scientific work which helps advancing sustainable mobility. Our disciplines are geography, spatial planning and applied cultural sciences.

Frederic is the director of T3. He studied spatial planning at the University of Dortmund and did his PhD at the University of Wuppertal on the promotion of e-bikes as a means of promoting low-carbon mobility. He joined T3 to broaden his research scope to economic geography. His current research focuses on location factors in the German bicycle industry.

Rafael focuses on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to systematically resolve diverse spatial problems. In his research he investigates potentials and limitations of manifold geoinformation obtained in the context of Citizen Science. He supports T3’s research through data analysis and with cartographic communication of mobility data, especially aspects of cycling.

Nils teaches at the University of Freiburg where he also did his PhD. His research focuses on climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptive capacity of natural and human systems. He supports the applied research of T3 by collecting, analysing and visualising (geo)data at the nexus of climate, mobility and societal change.

Janina is a researcher in the Mobility and Space Research Group at the ILS Institute for Regional and Urban Development Research in Dortmund. She completed her PhD at Leuphana University Lüneburg on the everyday mobility of people with a migration background. She supports T3 with surveys and analyses on sustainable mobility and cycling promotion.

The institute

The first concept of the T3 Transportation Think Tank was designed in 2018 by Professor Stefan Gössling. Subsequently, T3 was founded in 2021 by him, JobRad founder Ulrich Prediger and the industry association Zukunft Fahrrad. The T3 continues to cooperate with Stefan Gössling in research projects. Zukunft Fahrrad is the sole shareholder.

We finance our work through project-based funding from public and private clients, as well as donations from companies mainly from the cycling industry that place a high value on evidence-based research.

The Institute and its partners contribute to the realisation of the vision of a climate-neutral, environmentally friendly, healthy, affordable and flexible transport system. With our scientific expertise, we initiate the necessary changes in politics and society in a solution-oriented way.