Contact: Aruna Sivakumar
Email: a.sivakumar@imperial.ac.uk
Department: Civil Engineering
Institution: Imperial College London
Project timeline: October-December 2021
Project duration: 13 Weeks
Closing date: 15th August 2021
Expertise required: The student needs to have the following experience and expertise: (1) An understanding of transport systems and networks, and travel behaviour, and the stakeholders in this system; (2) Experience with conducting qualitative interviews; (3) Expertise in designing web-based surveys on Qualtrics; (4) Experience in developing theory of change models is not essential, but would be helpful; (5) Ability to communicate in Italian and Portuguese is not essential, but may be helpful
Project description: The main aim of this project is to undertake a process evaluation study of a set of e-bike initiatives that were trialled in London, Milan and Lisbon as part of the EU-funded Sharing Cities project (https://www.sharingcities.eu/). While the EU project was focused on monitoring and evaluating the impacts of these trials on behaviour and the environment using different quantitative datasets, there is an opportunity here to learn from the multi-city trials using a theory of change approach. The student intern will develop a theory of change model for the e-bike trials, and undertake a cross-national qualitative analysis of the challenges, what worked and what didn’t. The project will (a) produce guidelines for local authorities who are considering e-bike sharing schemes as a part of their smart city strategy, and (b) present a general methodology to analyse the effectiveness of smart city initiatives, using a process evaluation approach.
Description of work involved: The main tasks involved are: (1) Developing a theory of change model for the e-bike trials in London, Milan and Lisbon; (2) Developing questionnaires to engage with the stakeholders in each city; (3) Administering the questionnaires through a combination of web-based surveys and interviews via teleconference; (4) Analyse the interviews and survey results to determine the key drivers of change, the challenges, the lessons learnt etc; (5) Documentation of the process and the outcomes in the form of a report, an academic paper and a blogpost.
Student benefits: The anticipated benefits for the student are as follows: (1) working with and networking among a large multi-national project team (of the Sharing Cities project) including academics, public and private sector partners; (2) training through a real life application of the process evaluation approach; (3) producing a journal publication that is targeted at a Smart Cities journal