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.

Dr. Frederic Rudolph is the director of T3. He studied spatial planning at the University of Dortmund. He wrote his PhD thesis at the University of Wuppertal on the promotion of e-bikes as a means to foster low-carbon mobility. At the Wuppertal Institute, he conducted 15 years of intensive research on sustainable transport: he produced scenario studies on the decarbonization of the transport sector in Germany, cost-benefit analyses for walking and cycling, and he developed approaches to encourage municipal transport planning teams to become a learning organisation. Frederic’s research is action-oriented because this decade is critical to ensure the prevention of overshooting 1.5 degree mean global warming.

Rafael Hologa teaches at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, among other things, 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.

As a scientist, Nils Riach teaches at the University of Freiburg on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the systematic analysis of diverse spatial phenomena. 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.

Dr. Janina Welsch is a research fellow in the Mobility and Space Research Group at the ILS Institute for Regional and Urban Development Research in Dortmund. She wrote her PhD at Leuphana University Lüneburg on the everyday mobility of people with a migration background. She has more than 15 years of experience working on mobility behaviour, the transformation towards sustainable mobility, accessibility issues, and parking and mobility management in national and international research projects. In everyday life, she prefers to be mobile by bicycle. She supports T3’s activities by conducting research, surveys and analyses on sustainable mobility and bicycle 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.