“Mobility is a joint effort!”
door2door at the UITP Conference on The Future of Mobility in Small and Medium-sized Cities
Björn Siebert, Lead Policy and Regulatory Affairs, represented door2door at last week’s UITP Conference “The Future of Mobility in Small and Medium-sized Cities: Reconciling Public Transport and New Mobility Services” in Brussels.
Digital technologies and innovations, such as sensors, wireless networks and mobile applications, can provide great benefits and chances for cities and communities. They can help them to solve issues regarding the environment, safety, construction, waste and transportation and significantly reshape the future of urban areas.
Public transport and logistics, including New Mobility, are some of the hot topics in urban areas. Mobility is a key driver for economic well-being, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. However, the public dialogue tends to exclusively focus on new mobility solutions for large cities and often neglects the problems, needs and solutions for smaller and medium-sized cities or rural areas. New services such as ride-hailing, ridepooling, car-, bike- and scooter-sharing thrive in large cities, their absence in smaller cities astonishes us.
Because we believe there are plenty of great use and business cases for new mobility services in small and medium-sized cities!
Therefore we were delighted that the UITP brought together stakeholders to discuss the future of mobility in small and medium-sized cities and invited us to present our approach to new mobility services. At a conference on January 17th in Brussels we joined a fantastic panel discussion with representatives of Public Transportation Authorities such as Kolumbus from Norway and the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure of the Province of North Brabant in the Netherlands, Public Transportation Operators such as Arriva UK and Keolis from Belgium as well as one other New Mobility pioneer, Karos.
In Brussels, our Lead Policy and Regulatory Affairs Björn Siebert explained: “We believe that the backbone of mobility in every community — no matter the size — is public transportation and that new mobility services can only be sustainable as an integrated part of that existing system. Every city has different needs and requirements for mobility which can only be met when all stakeholders cooperate and work together in a partnership.”
door2door is such a partner to cities and public transport operators. In close cooperation with local players and authorities, we use data analytics, machine learning and simulations to analyze the supply and demand for mobility in the target region. The accumulated knowledge informs mobility action points such as replacing inefficient bus lines or helping to connect the outskirts to the existing public transport network by implementing on-demand ridepooling.
This way we enable our partners to develop tailor-made service designs and a business model that serves the local mobility needs while also being ecologically and financially sustainable.
The interactive panel was moderated by Ulrich Weber from the Stuttgarter Straßenbahnen AG and stimulated a fruitful discussion amongst its panelist and the audience who was able to actively participate using Slido, a great tool that stimulates audience interactions. There truly was no shortage of great ideas for new mobility business and use cases for small and medium-sized cities.
But the general consensus was: The key element for success and sustainability is a cooperative approach to mobility with a close partnership between all players involved — we couldn’t agree more!
Interested to see a use case for smaller cities and rural areas in action? Click here to read more about our rural on-demand ridepooling project, freYfahrt, in Freyung, Bavarian Forest.
written by Björn Siebert
