Cascais, Portugal Makes Transit More Accessible with MaaS

When the seaside city of Cascais in Portugal wanted to transform its mobility system, it didn't invest in pricey sensors or spend lavishly on infrastructure upgrades. Instead, it turned to a software platform powered by smartphones. When we bring this to one thing that is connecting all the smartphones from all the riders and use what they have is really cheap compared with the alternative. Paulo Ferreira de Santos is the CEO of UbiRider, the creator behind the PIC platform. This platform combines all the different modes of transportation within a city into one mobile app. Travelers use the app to plan and book trips, which then gives cities data to understand the flow of people throughout their borders and their preferred modes of transportation. enable a city to better manage the entire transit ecosystem. One of the things that Cascais is smart compared with other cities is instead of putting public tenders for bus operators to offer bus service in fixed lanes, they don't define fixed lanes. So they hire the number of buses, the miles that they do per day and the bus drivers. So they rent, they are renting this and the This gives them flexibility to change the bus lines or all the network, if they want. And one of the things that they have wanted with this system is knowing exactly how people flow. So they can adjust their network to the demand of transportation at each hour of the day. Mobility is among the top focus areas for Qashqai's smart city strategy, proving that even the suburbs could be a hotbed for mobility innovation. mobility as a service. Mobility as a service enables the city to test new business models in a way it organizes and operates various transit options. And for suburbs, mass solutions can solve the first mile problem. This is the challenge travelers face in easily moving from one point to another without a car. It's a much more complex way of looking at our transportation needs, because the app not only uses the bus as a transport transportation system, but people can use the train, they can walk, they can go with a bike. Marco Espinera is the head of Future at Cascais, a coastal resort town just 30 minutes outside of Lisbon. It's home to about 200,000 year-long residents, yet it tracks over a million visitors a year. The fluctuating population has forced the city to rethink how it manages its infrastructure and services. Cascais invested in a network of hydrogen buses. but it needed to direct people to use them, along with its other mobility services. So in 2016, it unveiled the mobile Qasqais app. It combines all the public and private transit players into one platform from where travelers can plan and book trips. To further encourage people to ditch their cars in favor of public transportation, Qasqais made free transportation passes available on the app for residents, workers, and students. We are managing a community, and there's people... that are working in Cascais, are living in Cascais, are studying in Cascais, each one of them has a different profile. We have solutions for each one of them and as soon as you log in to, in this case, this platform, the mobility platform, you bring with your login a bunch of a profile that has a bunch of benefits that are related to your condition. in the city if you go and want to park your car the app will give you and recognize and give you 30 minutes of parking for free because you are a resident i am a student and i will not have that benefit caskais initially partnered with celia to develop and manage mobile caskais as of october ub rider integrated the app into its platform the app uses rider's data plan three 4G, and soon 5G, to operate the direct communication between their smartphones and UB Riders cloud. The cloud is where data gets analyzed before being displayed on the PIC Insight interface. From there, cities and transit operators can manage ridership and fare collection. And commuters can use the app to plan and book trips across the entire region. They can book parking, rent scooters, charge an EV, buy a bus ticket, and even track their carbon footprint based on the type of transit they use. This is a big thing here in Europe to reduce the number of cars inside of the city. So the power of influencing the users to go and put the car outside of the city and knowing that they have good frequency of transit to bring them where they want to be inside of To compensate for free public transportation in Cascais, the city pays UbiRider a monthly flat fee. Cascais declined to share that number with us but as it defl- fee increases as the number of users increases. It's a model that Cascais says incentivizes UbiRider to innovate and evolve the platform. It aims to attract as many users as possible. And those users could soon have access to Cascais digital currency which the city hopes to unveil to the app next year. It is called Cash Cash and what that does is allows us again to manage the ecosystem. It's an incredible tool to incentivize and nudge behavioral change. In addition to the city's investments with Mobility as a Service, Cascais has also invested in trash sensors. We have some sensors of the humidity, noise, air quality. And those sensors are connected to a digital command center. For now, Cascais oversees the operation of U.B. Rocks. platform using its PIC Insight dashboard, but the city expects that the change as a platform becomes more automated. So clearly a lot more of these types of stories to explore, so be sure to stick with Current Insight. If you have a question on this story, hit the button below.