LocationsNext Practices for Sustainable Urban Mobility: Integrating Technology, Data, and Behavior to Reshape City Transportation
30 de Mayo de 2025
Illegal parking and traffic congestion visible via an aerial view of Bogotá's downtown. Photo: UNDP Colombia Accelerator Lab
By: Juan David Martín. Head of Experimentation. Accelerator Lab, Colombia
Understanding Bogotá: Where Mobility Meets Human Development
Urban mobility in Bogotá (Colombia) exemplifies the complexity faced by many developing cities. Recent Financial Times research (2022) ranks Bogotá among the world's most congested cities, with residents losing over 130 hours annually in traffic. The costs are profound: increased pollution, accidents, reduced productivity and declining quality of life, all directly impacting human development. While the city government continues implementing various mobility solutions, these complex challenges require complementary approaches that address underlying systemic patterns.
These challenges create cascading effects beyond transportation, limiting access to education, healthcare and economic opportunities, particularly for vulnerable populations. When people spend hours in traffic, they have less time for family and personal development, making sustainable urban mobility fundamentally a human development challenge.
Innovating at Scale: UNDP Accelerator Lab's Approach to Systemic Change
In the face of escalating global challenges, the UNDP Accelerator Labs embody a new philosophy: viewing problems not as isolated incidents but as signals of larger, interconnected, system-wide issues. We develop portfolios of targeted experiments testing, learning and scaling innovative solutions in real-world settings, fostering peer-to-peer learning across countries and regions.
The Accelerator Lab Network has prototyped a new kind of research and development (R&D): learning from signals of change to see patterns that create global business intelligence. As we evolve into UNDP's open, globally distributed R&D capability, we've built coalitions in high potential niches to show new ways to accelerate sustainable development.
Complementing this R&D approach, UNDP Colombia uses intelligent data integration, behavioral science, and AI to generate actionable development evidence. This methodology moves beyond traditional sources to understand local realities, design better policies, and drive inclusive growth through quality data generation with a territorial perspective.
Aerial photogrammetry 3D model taken by drone of Bogotá's downtown. Photo: UNDP Colombia Accelerator Lab
Data-Driven Urban Mobility Innovation: The Lab's Systemic Approach
Bogotá's city government has actively implemented various strategies to address illegal parking, including increasing fines, launching communication campaigns, and imposing car use restrictions. While these efforts continue, the Lab partnered with the Secretariat of Culture, Recreation and Sports of Bogotá to introduce a complementary systemic research approach grounded in behavioral science and data-driven R&D. At the heart of this collaborative approach is a key question: How can data-driven R&D help us understand illegal parking as a signal of broader urban dynamics and inform more sustainable mobility solutions for Bogotá?
This approach treats illegal parking not as an isolated problem, but as a window into interconnected dynamics that shape urban mobility patterns. By applying experimental R&D methodologies, the Lab aims to decode systemic signals that illegal parking reveals about the city's adaptive behaviors, infrastructure relationships, and governance patterns.
Central to this experiment is what we call our "Data Warehouse," which transforms complex datasets into actionable knowledge by integrating traditional and emergent data sources. Using advanced analytics and machine learning, it creates a "living system" through multiple tools: drones, 360-degree cameras, participatory mapping, web scrapping, behavioral science, and foresight exercises among others.
Cars illegally parked near a "no parking" sign illustrates the disconnect between regulations and actual behavior. Photo: UNDP Colombia Accelerator Lab
The Good, the Bad, and the Undecided: Personalities That Shape Urban Mobility
By analyzing how different archetypes respond to interventions, we aim to foster lasting behavioral change. Our initial design categorizes users into three archetypes: the first are habitual illegal parkers, who regularly park illegally, often because they see others doing the same or because enforcement is weak, making rule-breaking seem acceptable. Second are strict legal parkers, who always follow the rules because they are disciplined, aware of regulations, and tend to act responsibly regardless of the environment. The third group is the variable parkers, whose decisions fluctuate depending on the situation, such as time pressure, availability of legal parking, or social cues, making them more receptive to behavioral nudges and environmental influences.
Through our R&D approach, research will define additional profiles beyond these three archetypes, determining which hypothesis and subsequent experiments should be conducted with each to reveal where resistance to change is strong and identify opportunities for tailored interventions. This data-driven decision-making process helps us develop hypotheses about what drives not only parking choices, but broader sustainable mobility behaviors and how those drivers evolve over time. By analyzing behavioral and social patterns across all identified archetypes, and working with all additional data sources, we will understand how mobility behaviors are rooted in deeper systemic issues that influence responses to incentives and regulations. Our goal is to generate learnings about sustainable mobility transformation, using illegal parking as our strategic entry point into understanding the larger urban mobility ecosystem.
From Behaviors that Shape Cities, to Labs that Drive Sustainable Development
These learnings from our R&D experiments become what we call "next practices", proven innovations ready for scaling. In Colombia, the Lab has charted an innovative path over five years, practicing "leading by doing." By experimenting with prototypes and implementing tangible solutions, we create spaces for discussion, shared learning, and real-world testing that generate evidence for transformative human development impact.
We are currently in the research phase of this mobility experiment, collecting and analyzing data that reveals how illegal parking functions as a window into Bogotá's complex urban system. Based on these research findings, experimentation phases will be implemented by Bogotá's city government in alliance with the UNDP Colombia Accelerator Lab to address illegal parking policies. This partnership demonstrates how R&D translates into actionable governance, with research insights informing development approaches that will benefit both Bogotá's mobility solutions and global urban challenges.
Aerial photogrammetry 2D model taken by drone of Bogotá's downtown. Photo: UNDP Colombia Accelerator Lab
Join the Movement: Building Next Practices Together
As Lab members within this global network, we demonstrate how R&D reshapes development. Our work in this project with Bogotá government reveals how individual behaviors drive decisions on infrastructure, governance, and social dynamics, transforming these insights into scalable solutions that accelerate human development through mobility.
This methodology turns local signals into global intelligence, building next practices that fundamentally improve lives. The impact lies in helping cities approach complex challenges as interconnected opportunities to accelerate sustainable development at scale.
Want to learn more about how data-driven R&D can transform urban challenges? Interested in exploring how your organization might collaborate with experimental approaches to sustainable development? Connect with us at the UNDP Accelerator Labs to discover opportunities for partnership and knowledge exchange.