What if your commute "cost" you something? Not money, but shared credits that reflect your impact on the city? A new consortium project explores how mobility credits could tell you the most sustainable way to get to work each day, while doing your part to manage traffic in the busy city.

Delft University of Technology, together with Technolution, AMS Institute and Fynch Mobility developed the Urban Mobility Incentive Exchange (UMIX) app as a behavioral experiment and are seeking companies to participate.

Join the UMIX experiment here.

UMIX is one of the key ideas explored in an article by Connekt, a mobility network convenor, on the digital spaces where travelers agree on their behavior through clear ground rules. Read on for how instead of everyone for themselves, commuters can travel according to the collective interest. (See original article in Dutch here.)

From Competition to Coordination: Engagement Spaces in Practice

Published 9 March 2026 on Connekt.nl

How can we deal with [mobility] scarcity without competing against each other? The concept of "engagement spaces" may sound abstract, but two example projects show how travelers, residents, and businesses are already learning to coordinate. From a street that collectively saves toward road safety to an urban experiment with mobility credits. Here's how engagement spaces come to life, step by step.

Anyone who has ever been stuck in traffic, couldn't find a seat on the train, or queued for a shared bicycle knows it: our mobility system is full of scarcity — and it's only increasing. For decades, the focus was on expanding supply by building more infrastructure. But with space constraints, nitrogen challenges, and climate targets making endless construction impossible, the question increasingly becomes: how do we distribute what we do have — smartly, fairly, and together?

That calls for innovative concepts. One idea is to have travelers coordinate their travel patterns with one another. Imagine if travelers could see the effect their travel behavior has on other people's ability to get around. Better yet: imagine they were actively encouraged to swap their spot with someone else and instead opt for a more sustainable, safer, or less congested alternative. This is the idea behind "engagement spaces" — physical or digital spaces where people arrive at the best collective choices through agreed-upon rules.

Within these engagement spaces, interaction is facilitated. Travelers come to understand the consequences of their choices for others and are encouraged to make room for one another. That probably sounds abstract and idealistic — but on closer inspection, it's already being applied in practice. Here are two examples.

Example 1: SafetySafe

Anyone who's driven through a residential neighborhood knows the sign: a smiley face that grins green or frowns red depending on your speed. But what if every green smiley, alongside promoting safety, also generated something extra for the neighborhood you're driving through?

That's the principle behind the SafetySafe — an innovative approach to road safety in which good behavior is rewarded with a donation toward a shared savings goal. Rather than fining the individual offender, it rewards the collective good behavior of the neighborhood.

The Power of Saving Together

In the neighborhood where the SafetySafe is installed, an evening meeting with residents kicks things off. It begins with a shared desire to work toward a more pleasant neighborhood. Alongside the wish for safer driving behavior, other ideas emerge: a new play area, a safer pedestrian crossing, or perhaps more greenery on the street?

The best ideas go to a digital vote, and the whole neighborhood gets to weigh in. The municipality then adopts this savings goal.

Then the real work begins: the display is installed and the savings counter is activated. Every car that respects the speed limit adds to the growing total — and it works. One proud resident put it this way:

"The initiative really made a difference. Before, 85% of passing cars in this street were speeding. During the campaign, that dropped to 29%."

Drivers slow down and the neighborhood's savings goal gets realized. But the real effect is social. People feel more connected to their neighborhood because they're working together on something that belongs to them. Neighbors seek each other out more, and the sense of community grows stronger.

SafetySafe as an Engagement Space

The SafetySafe essentially creates an engagement space: it brings a group of people together to make agreements that lead to a better outcome for everyone. By coordinating with one another and rewarding socially desirable behavior, an outcome emerges that benefits all.

And of course, once the display is gone, old habits can creep back for some. Sometimes a new physical savings goal in the street prompts a repeat of the exercise. Sometimes infrastructure changes are made to the street itself. The realized savings goal then becomes a permanent reminder of shared success — ensuring this project restores a sense of "we" in a mobility system that otherwise too often revolves around "me."

Example 2: Mobility Credits

Let's zoom out from the neighborhood to the city as a whole — where another challenge plays out: not just safety, but space.

In Amsterdam, demand for mobility is growing rapidly. According to the report Amsterdam Maakt Ruimte, public transport use is projected to rise by 40% toward 2034, cycling by 39%, and car traffic by 28%. Since building more infrastructure in an already packed city is barely possible, the conclusion is clear: Amsterdam must make smarter use of what it already has.

A consortium of TU Delft, AMS Institute, and Technolution is therefore researching a new system: mobility credits.

Mobility as a Shared Value

The idea is as simple as it is radical: give people a budget for travel. Each journey "costs" a portion of that budget, depending on its impact. Cycling is cheap; driving costs more. People are thus given the space to coordinate together over who makes which journey.

The concept itself is not new — it has existed since 1997 — yet it has never been implemented in practice. Experiments have been conducted, however. In one, participants were given game scenarios: it's raining and you're meeting friends for dinner — which travel option do you choose? Each option costs credits, and participants could sometimes buy or sell credits too. And something striking happened: as soon as people could see each other's choices, they began acting in self-interest — purely because the system made that behavior possible.

It was a confronting but instructive discovery: cooperation requires rules.

From Game to Reality

The next step, the metaCCAZE project, brings this idea into practice. Rather than everyone receiving the same number of credits, the allocation is tailored to individual circumstances — based on distance, available transport alternatives, and household composition. Participants track their balance via a digital platform.

This creates a new engagement space: a digital place where people coordinate their travel choices through agreed-upon rules. Participants don't just follow their own travel behavior — they gain insight into the collective picture. What is the ceiling that we, as a group (say, everyone working at the same organization), can aim for to reduce emissions, space use, or accidents?

The emphasis here is not on restriction, but on awareness. "Nobody wants to be limited in their mobility, and that's understandable," says Daniël Scheeroren, researcher at AMS Institute. "That's why we chose to frame the 'ceiling' as an aspirational target rather than a restriction. Hopefully, awareness of that target will already account for much of the change."

Learning from What Already Works

The SafetySafe and mobility credits may seem entirely different. One is visible on the street; the other plays out in data and apps. Yet they touch the same core: organizing interaction. Both initiatives encourage people to align their behavior, see each other's perspective, and collaborate within rules they understand — and help shape themselves.

That is the essence of an engagement space: a place where cooperation emerges, where "giving something to others" pays off, and where people learn to deal with scarcity without it feeling like loss. Whatever form it takes, it always begins with the same question: "How do we make mobility something we manage together, rather than each for ourselves?"

Conclusion

From the village street to the packed city, a clearer need is emerging everywhere: we must relate to space differently. But we don't want people to change because they "have to." We want it to feel meaningful to do something differently — to understand why it's necessary, to feel that it's fair, and to see what it yields for themselves and others.

Connekt sees in this a promising direction. Examples like the SafetySafe and mobility credits sketch the first contours of how this new approach can work in mobility. Behavioral change then happens not out of a sense of obligation, but because the system makes it the logical choice. Engagement spaces show how we can organize exactly that.