Reinventing Urban Mobility: Making the Best of Two Worlds

The transport industry has undergone structural changes throughout its history. Besides resulting in major changes in the way we move, they have also had a significant impact on our territories and the manner in which we organize our lives and society. The train killed off the horse-and-carriage; the car forced local trams into retirement; and the plane practically ended passenger ships. Over the last decade, all indicators have shown that we are gradually entering a new transport era. Digital services – which first conquered the immaterial world (music, cinema, press, etc.) – are now rapidly developing and making inroads into the material world. This is especially evident in the expansion of privately-owned mobility services, the use of big data and the automation of vehicles.

Given these developments, now is a good time to assess the ways we produce and organize our transportation systems. Some segments have always been managed, and largely organized, by the private sector (airlines, airports, ports, taxis, etc.). Others were launched or taken over by the public sector in order to provide a service accessible to the entire population (railways, public transport). The private and public sectors unfortunately struggle to collaborate efficiently, as their ways of working, risk management and working timeframes are diametrically opposed. Transportation is however clearly an area where collaboration is essential, because it is operated for the benefit of all citizens and businesses.

Developments in the digital economy offer a unique opportunity to take advantage of the respective strengths of both the public and private sectors. To that end, we need a cultural change on the part of all transport sector stakeholders. The goal should be an era of openness and cooperation, in line with the emergence of the collaborative economy.

Open innovation

Innovation cannot be commanded from above, but it can be supported or facilitated. Recent experiments with open innovation have demonstrated the value of opening the thinking process to a wider range of contributors, so as to bring in new ideas and break down barriers between established structures. This openness can be tapped into by the authorities and public enterprises, as well as by private companies.

Tesla Motors is a good yet unusual example of an innovation-focused company, yet it is probably a forerunner in this field. Elon Musk has decided to offer ‘open’ access to the patents on his electric cars. In his view, if a company depends solely on its patents, it is not innovating or at least not innovating fast enough. He believes that patents hold back innovation and block competitors, adding that patents are mostly used to “stifle progress and consolidate the positions of giant corporations.”

The French National Railway Company (SNCF) is now aware that it cannot do everything alone, despite all its internal skills. As a result, the company decided to start an open innovation process by seeking out external expertise. It set up digital challenges on two themes: ‘data’ and ‘sensors’. SNCF wanted to identify innovative and sufficiently mature companies that would enable it to concretely address specific issues. Its role here is to support these companies in their development, focusing on what benefits the SNCF and travellers.

Good data

Open Data has demonstrated its relevance by creating many high-value applications (multimodal route planners, parking optimization, better integration of persons with reduced mobility, etc.). This opening trend is well underway and further significant benefits can be expected from it in the transport sector. Data will effectively enhance services to users, strive for more rational travel behaviour, and optimize existing infrastructure.

Many cities have lacked in-depth knowledge of their mobility patterns

However, the opening of data remains incomplete. The private sector, particularly digital actors, increasingly owns a significant amount of transport-related data, thanks to its tracking of individuals through mobile terminals. The big challenge for the coming years is to optimize existing services and make clever investment decisions, in order to generate the best cost-efficiency ratio for society as a whole.

Many cities have lacked in-depth knowledge of their mobility patterns. This has prevented them from making coherent choices and above all from making accurate assessments of the impact of their mobility policies. Historically, travel surveys gave an insight into the mobility of citizens by calling on statistical methods that required extrapolation of sources of inaccuracies. These surveys focused mainly on work-related travel, which is now an increasingly small share of overall mobility. Today, people typically have different travel patterns from one week to another and even on a daily basis. This reinforces the need for better contextualization, in order to understand people’s travel needs and choices. Digital tools can integrate multiple sensors to characterize the context, trace movements and to process large amounts of data in real time. None of this data or work could be processed/done with traditional methods.

A project in the Belgian Province of Walloon Brabant demonstrated the relevance of such data (by analysing the data from mobile phones and GPS). For the first time in Belgium, true mobility could be seen, in terms of trips made by the entire population and regardless of travel patterns. These tools have the great advantage of working in ‘feedback loops’: once the policies have been implemented, the effects can be seen and quantified by these tools. To achieve this however the public and private sectors should engage in a process of active cooperation. This means that cooperation should not be limited only to the collection of data, but should include a real co-construction of assessment tools while maintaining the highest degrees of people’s privacy.

Foresight legislation

New legislation on mobility must be developed with care and efficiency

New legislation on mobility must be developed with care and efficiency, because of the emergence of many start-ups in the field of transport and the gradual establishment of giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (GAFA) or Netflix, AirBNB, Tesla, Uber (NATU). Changes in the transport field are happening too fast and most new mobility entrepreneurship concepts do not comply with the existing legislation, which was established before the advent of the digital age. This means that more flexible rules need to be adopted in this field, in order to encourage experimentation. Indeed, the impact of new mobility services can only be measured if they have reached a critical mass, which is not the case in a pilot project with just a limited sample of users. This situation obviously risks destabilizing markets or introducing unfair competition. To define flexible and scalable legislation, there needs to be better dialogue between public authorities and businesses. It will also be important to set up a co-development approach, one that respects the right to competition and allows the authorities to avoid a permanent loss of control over mobility services.

Cooperative funding

The transport sector needs huge investments to be implemented over many years. Most cities are facing budget cuts, which limits the investments made in transport networks. Furthermore, over the past decade, the operational costs of public transport services have generally grown faster than ridership. This has reduced cost coverage ratios. It is therefore illusory to think that public spending alone can meet the transport challenges of our cities.

New forms of funding are required to accelerate the development of alternatives to the private car. Companies have a clear interest in contributing directly to the improvement of transport networks and the development of new services. Not in the form of a tax, as happens today in France with a transport tax (versement transport), but by taking a financial interest in the form of a ‘tax shelter’, a financial mechanism used for example by Belgium’s film sector. Any company that wants to invest in and support an audiovisual production in the country can, via this mechanism, benefit from exemption of any retained taxable profits worth up to 150% of the amounts actually paid. As a result, the legislator ensures that investors in this sector are only exposed to limited financial risk, while greatly boosting investment.

Citizens can contribute to the overall revenues of mobility systems by making greater use of the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

Businesses can also support the transport sector by making available resources that are underutilized, such as their car parks. For instance, in order to support car-pooling, a non-financial public-private partnership project has started in Wallonia to pool the large car parks of supermarkets. In just one year, over 500 parking places across the region were made available, at a very much lower cost than the construction of new car parks while avoiding the loss of agricultural lands. But the greatest benefit of this scheme lies mainly in private partners’ ability to communicate the benefits of car-pooling and ultimately to reduce congestion on the roads of Wallonia. Unfortunately, the region’s current transport minister has not grasped the importance of this partnership, which has led to the expansion of car parks through new partnerships being interrupted.

Citizens can also contribute more to the overall revenues of mobility systems by making greater use of the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). This is a field in which Finland is without doubt a pioneer. MaaS represents a shift away from personally-owned modes of transportation, towards mobility solutions that are consumed as a service. This is enabled by combining transportation services from public and private transportation providers through a unified gateway that creates and manages the trip, which users can pay for with a single account. Users can pay per trip or a monthly fee for a limited distance.

A large-scale development of the monthly or annual subscription concept for a household would transfer a huge and unprecedented sums of money to the shared mobility sector (public transport, car- and bike-sharing, taxis, etc.). Today household expenditure on transport, at least in Belgium, accounts for more than 90% acquisition, use and maintenance of motor vehicles. If these individual budgets were better shared through a global system of mobility, the vehicles would be used more efficiently and the investment capacity in the system would be significantly increased.

We can say that the biggest challenge when tackling urban mobility problems is not to invent or reinvent mobility options, as most are already well-known and have proved to be highly efficient. The true challenge is to ensure that urban mobility is one of the highest priorities for citizens, companies and governments. Urban mobility needs real and transparent cooperation in order to optimize and accelerate good practices in this field. Often when you are struggling with a problem, rather than reinventing the wheel, you should call a friend or colleague to see if they have faced a similar problem. The same should systematically happen in our cities, with private partners and public bodies talking to one another to find common solutions.

The big challenge for the coming years is to optimize existing services and make clever investment decisions

Insights from Xavier Tackoen, CEO of Espaces-Mobilités:

Espaces-Mobilités is a consultancy that has been active for more than 20 years in strategic transport projects and landscape design, with the goal of improving mobility in urban and rural areas. It has always been a pioneer in new mobility services such as car-sharing, dynamic ride-sharing, pool taxis or urban cable cars.

Definitely. For many years, we’ve been working for public bodies such as regions or municipalities, in order to define mobility plans that only engage public actors. Over the last five years and with the very rapid development of start-ups and digital giants, we have become an intermediary between the private and public sectors. This role is vital, because both these sectors need a neutral coordinator to guarantee their individual interests and to help them understand the constraints faced by each side.

Espaces-Mobilités is convinced that high-resolution 3D footage can help citizens and officials to visualize mobility solutions for a more sustainable future. Many mobility projects involve changing the urban landscape and adapting public space. People are often afraid of change because they don’t know how things will be. 3D visuals offer a more comprehensive view of the new environment and facilitate the adoption of new infrastructure.

Xavier Tackoen, CEO of Espaces-Mobilités