Mobility and its impact on everyday life
Let’s get in the forefront of future Mobility tendencies
Mobility is a crucial topic in daily discussions of cities, territories, communities, and their citizens. Nowadays, the evolution and adaptation of Mobility have proven to be an essential topic due to its role in people’s daily life and city planning. The development of Mobility trends and technologies has created new and innovative Mobility solutions that aim to improve the quality of life.
The growth in Mobility services can be related to sustainability, more specifically by using sustainable Mobility solutions. Therefore, several new trends are gaining notoriety and demonstrating technology’s importance in Mobility in future years.
The future of Mobility has been a trending topic for quite some time. With the adoption of different modes of transit and solutions, it has become inevitable to discuss what the future will look like in terms of Mobility. However, due to the enormous impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on Mobility and Mobility trends, governments around the world restricted public transit usage to reduce social contact and thus limit the spread of the virus. In this sense, COVID-19 caused cities to have less public and more personal transportation, such as cars.
Due to the influence of several external factors, be it COVID-19 or the rapid development of new technologies, Mobility has been undergoing several transformational changes resulting in new Mobility tendencies.
In their majority, these tendencies focus on three disruptive areas: Sustainable Mobility, Connected and Autonomous Mobility and Mobility-as-a-Service. Nevertheless, we’ve developed them further on our Mobility Forecast (here if you want to check it out).
Sustainable Mobility
Sustainability is in everyone’s hands. In the scope of Mobility, it is usually associated with emission reduction, which significantly impacts human health and world cleanness.
One of the most well-known ways of lowering emissions is using electric options in current transit options. Be it buses, cars, bicycles, or other modes of transit, all (most probably) have an electric option.
However, the availability of electric alternatives is only a part of solving the overall sustainability problem. Options are relevant to allow citizens to use them, but the supply side needs to act faster to allow for (even) more availability. In addition, the supply side needs to incentivise users to change their behaviours by creating a similar experience to existing ones or giving people emission-reduction-driven apps to allow them to understand their global impact. Their impact leads to the community’s impact, which leads to the cities, territory, country and, in the end, the world.
The current question is how the supply side can provide targets. Or better yet, which are these targets?
Simply enough, we can see these targets as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These are the objectives that we all, as one, need to be on the lookout for. In this sense, the apps and technology to allow for decarbonisation and emission lowering should always be aware of the SDG and have them as a north star.
Recently Ubiwhere has been focusing on having an app, GoGreen, to allow these initiatives to be a reality. The app aims to create a Carbon Digest for the citizens who install it, making them aware of their contribution to the overall goals.
Connected, Cooperative and Autonomous Mobility
The concept of Connected and Cooperative Mobility is one of the latest trends in Mobility. At its core, it simply connects the cars via On-Board Units to the infrastructure where the Road Side Units are installed. Although it might seem like a simple connection between two road actors, the data generated is crucial for decision-making and predicting road events and other road intelligence.
Municipalities, territories and other stakeholders can even use it to improve road safety and traffic efficiency by having all connected vehicles cooperate to understand possible road hazards or opening up the way for an emergency vehicle to pass by.
At this stage and with the ongoing conversations on the telecom side, we must remember that we need a clear, concise and robust networking backbone to allow this kind of communication to be a reality. In this sense, Mobility services need to be placed at the Edge of the network (making them closer to the other actors — OBU) and have very little latency associated with their communications. Several 5G-enabled networks allow this to be a reality, therefore, Connected and Cooperative Mobility needs to be aware and tightly coupled with the networking initiatives and low-latency communication uprise.
Recently, with Aveiro City Council and Instituto de Telecomunicações, Ubiwhere brought to Aveiro the Ride2Autonomy Autonomous Shuttle, a true Mobility revolution during Aveiro Tech Week. This project consists of having a bus powered by electricity that drives by itself, stopping when it encounters any obstacle, and it’s one of the first glimpses of Autonomous Mobility.
Mobility-as-a-Service
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) refers to integrating several different Mobility solutions into a single, unified service, providing a centralised approach to Mobility. This service aims to enable stakeholders with a tool that allows them to plan, book and pay for their journey using any available mode of transit within a single app, choosing every detail in their journey, including its environmental impact. This solution helps to achieve societal change and the adoption of more green and sustainable means of transportation.
In the last years, MaaS switched from being a dream to quietly becoming a reality since we are seeing more and more journey planners in cities, and there are more modes of transit available than ever.
Right now, we face a problem of scalability. Here scalability refers to adding a new mode of transit to the central platform and having it be integrated with every other that was already there. To put it simply, how can we unlock the centralised view of the systems we are buying into in the future?
For this, we need to be interoperable. We must (whenever possible) design a system that is sustainable for years to come and that solves the issues of today but bootstraps the possibilities of the future.
The concept of interoperability relates to the ability of different systems, devices, applications and products to connect and communicate with each other effortlessly for the user. Within the Mobility sector, this concept is quite attractive since it facilitates different devices, such as vehicles and infrastructures, to connect and communicate, even enabling the creation of a platform that aggregates Mobility options.
To put it in perspective, the concept of Mobility Hubs, for example, derives from the idea to co-locate different Mobility options and transport modes in a specific physical location, assembling other Mobility solutions and allowing the user to choose the one that suits them better. These served as a strategy to enhance the impact surrounding sustainable Mobility options and should be mapped out in a digital form, allowing for the demand and supply to grow in tandem and with the necessary needs to accommodate every aspect of Mobility.
MaaS is the cornerstone of a well-integrated and scalable digital Mobility solution. It has the capability of integrating every other Mobility domain by unlocking their information and delivering them to the correct stakeholders. And more importantly, be able to be benchmarked against the strategic goals, for example, SDG.
To present solutions and trends in urban Mobility, Ubiwhere created the Mobility Forecast 2022 for its partners and clients, expecting to define and discuss Mobility and its solutions while also focusing on Ubiwhere’s take on Mobility. Ubiwhere has analysed these changes and how Mobility has been evolving and adapting while focusing on future Mobility tendencies and what are now considered to be indispensable technologies for future Mobility. In this sense, the Mobility Forecast 2022 is an analytical review of Mobility, its tendencies and the most relevant technologies to be employed for the further development of Mobility solutions.
Lastly, I want to say thanks for the possibility of giving my perspective on this matter. However, this article reflects not only my opinions but also the opinions of the team working at Ubiwhere. I want to thank those in Product, R&I, Sales and Communication who are making it very easy to write and communicate to a broader audience.
PS: Ubiwhere has several solutions related to Mobility, all are in very different stages of their product cycle and all very relevant for the continuous implementation of the MaaS dreams. The possibilities are endless, from one of the most significant deployments of Smart Parking in Portugal to one of the most innovative projects for Connected Mobility.
