Unlocking the Future of Mobility Data: Challenges and Solutions

During the pandemic, the world experienced many lockdowns, leading to people working from home, so less mobility. According to NASA, pandemic restrictions reduced global nitrogen dioxide concentrations, related to fuel combustion, by nearly 20%. But as the world has gone back to normal, some of the mobility issues have come back and they're recurring across Europe and the world. We see that some challenges are coming back, like increased congestion, air, noise pollution, and also accessibility to public transport and other mobility options. So what we try to do is take them by the hand looking at what is actually your challenge, and then also look for solution providers that can help them to find solutions and implement those. To face those issues, Europe has put a big focus on mobility data. The data can be used to run simulations and to predict movements which will allow public transport operators to understand when peaks take place and then decide whether to increase services or not. It's also used to inform road users of congestion areas, for example. Mobility data is even useful for predicting pollution and air quality, and therefore curbing it. One of the things that the European Commission actually at a macroeconomic level estimates that information on traffic, real time traffic information and train delays will save up to €730 million and 27 million hours, which is equivalent to 27.8 billion savings in costs and labour costs. So this is a huge impact that we can make with mobility data spaces, we can really be more interconnected and make mobility more accessible to the people. And we are involved in European projects on the topic as well. And there we have identified 400 mobility data spaces in Europe, and it's so important that they get to work together, share access to the data and to provide the services. So if all European cities are actually investing in sustainable urban mobility, then transition to reduce the CO2 emissions, this could lead to net benefits of €128 per citizen per year. There is no shortage of data. Private and public mobility entities generate it constantly. However, there is an issue with sharing and silos. For business, technical and privacy issues, vendors and public entities fail or struggle to share the data, something that is hindering the work of innovators, mobility agencies and vendors who, with data sharing, would be able to scale and improve their solutions, improving mobility in cities itself. What is a very important is that they learn from each other, as they share experiences, good practices, and that they then also try to scale their solutions elsewhere and thereby also lower costs. But that's not enough. So that's one of the aspects, then we need large scale investments from across the public and private sectors. They need to collaborate. And one of the things can be on data access. If those large scale investments are not happening, probably it's not very likely that European cities will achieve the CO2 reduction targets set by the Green Deal. To speed up those pilots and investments, data sharing is key, so the organization has set up data groups to share knowledge and launched accelerator programs for European mobility startups, but they also put a focus on mobility labs. Our living labs is where we bring together citizens with private and public sectors to jointly design, co-create and implement new solutions. And these are really working well. But at (EIT) Urban Mobility, we facilitate those processes as well, bringing all those players together. And up to now, we have implemented 240 pilots over 100 cities across Europe. Like we're seeing in the smart city industry in general, it's not about gathering data anymore. Data is coming in from IoT sensors, satellites, telcos, apps... The issue lies in how to manage, share and efficiently use it. To do that, both vendors and cities are asking for interoperability and openness. The issue is that in an industry where software is becoming king, data rules, so for many vendors, data is the protagonist of their solutions. So that openness could mean that companies could lose their biggest source of revenue. So until companies see the benefits that sharing data could bring, like improving their solutions, creating new ones, or allowing for mobility as a service, that sharing might not happen.