Scenario building game

Thanks to the speed and ease of use of MOMOS for evaluating packages of urban policies, the model has been used to support a new type of application: an interactive workshop on scenario building. The workshop was part of a Summer Course, organized by the CIVITAS MUSE initiative, that took place in the city of Trnava (Slovakia) in September 2025.

Objective

The aim of the workshop was to guide participants in the process of scenario building, moving from understanding the current situation toward envisioning and designing future strategies. To support this activity, the use of the MOMOS model provided participants with the possibility to experiment with the design and application of urban policy scenarios under a limited financial budget.

To this end, the MOMOS model was customized with inputs tailored to the context of an east European city (similar in size to Trnava). A predefined set of policy measures has been prepared in terms of timing and intensity of their reach, and each mobility policy was assigned a fictitious cost. In this first application, the costs associated with each policy represented not only the monetary cost of its implementation and management, but also a monetization of political acceptability. Indeed, the intention was to introduce a measure that would better reflect the actual decision-making process of local administrations, in which policy choices cannot be reduced to financial expenditure alone.

Participants were asked to design scenarios to achieve specific sustainable mobility objectives using limited resources. The assigned objectives ranged from promoting walking and cycling to improving cycle safety and managing car speeds on city streets.

Game rules

Key output results

The output results selected for this type of workshop application consisted in a small set of indicators, to be concise and easy to interpret and to allow for a quick comparison between groups. The main graphs presented focused on modal split within the urban area and GHG emissions per capita.

Moreover, since the workshop in Trnava was also focusing on safety, indicators related to road accidents were also included, considering serious and fatal accidents in terms of rates (accidents per passenger-km). These indicators were shown for all transport modes, as well as specifically for cycling.

Takeaways and next steps

The model proved to be a useful tool for supporting this kind of interactive workshop by allowing a quick comparison of alternative scenarios based on different combinations of policy measures. Further options will be explored to allow for providing a more interactive use of the model on-site. Furthermore, in future similar applications, monetary costs and social acceptability could be explicitly separated, providing a clearer picture of the challenges involved in the design and implementation of urban mobility scenarios.