In our cities, many alternatives to individual car use already exist such as cycling, carpooling, public transit, electric vehicles and so on but why don’t more people use them? As travellers, how often do we sit in a traffic jam, frustrated and late for an appointment? As policy makers and transport planners, how do we encourage people to perceive these alternatives as being realistic options?
The mission of the FLOW project is to put walking and cycling on an equal footing with motorised modes by developing a user-friendly methodology to assess the effectiveness of walking and cycling measures in addressing urban road congestion. FLOW targets three main stakeholder groups: cities, businesses and decision-makers - with the aim of shifting the way these groups think about and act on the potential for non-motorised transport to reduce congestion. FLOW will communicate the project’s results through tailored materials for use by practitioners in each of these three key fields.
OPTICITIES is aiming high, intending to develop and test interoperable ITS solutions in six different cities in order to provide urban citizens with the best possible journey conditions and to optimize urban logistics operations. OPTICITIES gathers 25 partners from across Europe (6 cities, service providers, car industry, research laboratories and major European networks) and will strive to pave the way towards smart urban mobility.
GATEway (Greenwich Automated Transport Environment) is an £8m research project, led by TRL and jointly funded by Innovate UK and industry, to understand and overcome the technical, legal and societal challenges of implementing automated vehicles in an urban environment. Taking place in Greenwich, one of the UK’s leading smart cities, the project will trial and validate a series of different use cases for automated vehicles, including driverless shuttles and automated urban deliveries.
The project entails testing the MJW in combination with the smart meters that are being used at home and in the office. The project will test the optimal integration of the MJW and the smart meter. The idea is to start with the rollout of the smart meters that are currently being organised by a number of electricity grid managers. A further objective of the project is to study the opportunities available for smart battery charging for several vehicles at a single office location.
The Bike Share Map shows the locations of docking stations associated with bicycle sharing systems from 100+ cities around the world. Each docking station is represented by a circle, its size and colour depending on the size and number of bicycles currently in it. The maps generally update every few minutes. There is a version that replays the last 24 hours of colour and size changes. In many cities, an ebb and flow of cycle commuters can be seen.
Vélib’ is a self-service bike system available 24 hours a day, all year round in Paris. It was launched in 2007. Until the recent years the initiative has been enlarged to more than 15,000 bicycles and 1,200 rental stations. The first 30 minutes (or 45 for Vélib’ Passion users) are always free. The system is operated by JCDecaux, and the grey bicycles are produced in Hungary by the French bicycle company Mercier.
Street Lab is Copenhagen’s testarea for smart city solutions in real urban space based on the award-winning world best smart city concept Copenhagen Connecting. It will be a showcase for the newest technologies within smart city and IoT, to demonstrate the potential in these technologies to citizens, decision-makers and companies, and provide a proof of concept for scaling the qualified solutions to larger parts of the city, as well as to other cities in the region, nationally and abroad.
Kalasatama Smart City district of Helsinki is an experimental innovation platform to co-create smart urban infrastructure and services. This centrally located old harbour area is developed flexibly and through piloting, in close co-operation with residents, companies, city officials and other stakeholders. The vision of Kalasatama is to become so resource-wise that residents will gain an extra hour of own time every day.
London's transportation system is one of the most smartly managed systems of the world. Close to 80% of community travel is done through the smart Oyster Card. This makes it possible for TfL (Transport for London, the city's mobility operator) to analyse and use large sets of travel data to develop the transportation system. To date, more than 200 mobility apps have been developed in the city based on the open data principles of TfL.