Perspectives

Cities explore digital mobility platforms

Accelerating the realization of seamless, integrated transportation

​Urbanites are increasingly taking advantage of different transportation options: carsharing, ride-hailing, bikesharing, greenbelts, pedestrian paths. As a new mobility ecosystem emerges—including autonomous vehicles—it's time for cities to move toward developing integrated mobility platforms.

Transportation challenges around the world

Today congestion and other transportation-related issues are major challenges in many cities around the globe, fueled by population growth, urbanization, inefficient transportation systems, and a shortfall of investment in public infrastructure. Residents and visitors alike feel every pothole, subway delay, and traffic jam.

Many city managers are straining to meet citizens’ mobility needs and ease some of the problems, and partially in response, companies have brought forth an array of mobility-related innovations. While still a small fraction of the overall mobility landscape, many urbanites are flocking to an expanded array of transportation options—carsharing, ride-hailing, bikesharing, greenbelts and pedestrian paths, and others—in many cases substituting for existing outmoded, inconvenient, and at times unreliable transit systems. With the emergence of shared autonomous mobility, connected infrastructure, and smart cities technologies, the prospects for an urban intermodal transportation ecosystem that is faster, cheaper, cleaner, and safer appear to be just over the horizon. 1

But to truly harness emerging technologies to solve the most vexing problems, cities likely need a comprehensive, interoperable system that transcends existing infrastructure, drives standardization and interoperability, enables value creation by key parties, and cultivates technological advancements.

Integrated mobility platform

The concept is hardly new. Researchers at the University of Southern California described an “Intermodal Transportation Operation System” back in 1998.2 But recent technological advances bring the possibility closer than ever, and a number of cities have already put into place components of such an integrated mobility platform:

  • Columbus, Ohio, the winner of the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, has announced a program to create a Smart Columbus Operating System. The system will share near-real-time data on conditions throughout the city, focusing initially on mobility but eventually encompassing a full range of smart city domains.3
  • Singapore’s Intelligent Transport System incorporates electronic road pricing, congestion charges, and traffic monitoring via highway sensors and taxi GPS applications, all funneled to a control center that allows tracking and traveler notifications.4
  • Copenhagen has launched the world’s first city data marketplace, a real-world example of the mobility data exchanges that could form a key component of a broader mobility platform.5 Multiple cities and private sector players are exploring mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) models as well.6
  • Barcelona and surrounding cities have implemented an open-source platform called Sentilo that brings together data from multiple sources and underpins the deployment of smart parking and smart transit services, as well as energy consumption monitoring and smart waste collection.7 The City Council has also implemented City OS to connect various city projects and services on a single platform.8
  • Dubai launched a “Smart Dubai” initiative in early 2014, led by the city’s Road and Transport Authority, which has initiated several pilot projects in traffic management, parking, electronic toll systems, and congestion management. The city also announced the creation of a “Smart Dubai Platform,” in partnership with Dubai-based telecom company du, which it aims to make the “digital backbone” of the city, enabling open data-sharing.9
  • Helsinki residents have been able to use a MaaS app called Whim to plan and pay for all modes of public and private transportation within the city—be it by train, taxi, bus, carshare, or bikeshare. Anyone with the app can enter a destination, select her preferred mode of getting there—or, in cases where no single mode covers the entire door-to-door journey, a combination thereof—and go. Users can either prepay for the service as part of a monthly mobility subscription, or pay as they go using a payment account linked to the service. The goal is to make it so convenient for users to get around that they opt to give up their personal vehicles for city commuting, not because they’re forced to but because the alternative is more appealing.10

Some of these solutions are showcase examples of mobility-as-a-service.

MaaS platforms let users plan and book door-to-door trips using a single app, answering the question of how best to get individual users where they’re going based on real-time conditions throughout the network, taking account of all the possible options and each user’s own preferences (for example, time and convenience versus cost), and facilitating seamless mobile payment.11

Other initiatives, such as Columbus’s planned system, envision a more comprehensive “digital backbone” that provides transparency about conditions across modes and ultimately could enable operators to dynamically balance supply and demand, improving throughput.

Such integrated mobility platforms can facilitate MaaS, and MaaS can ease creation of a broader platform, but neither is a necessary condition for the other.

Explore additional case studies where we have already helped cities on their smart city journey.

Emerging mobility ecosystem

The examples highlighted here are some of the first steps toward this vision of seamless, intermodal urban mobility. Putting new connected services in context and conversation—helping them work together for the benefit of users, third-party providers, and the city itself—could be key to realizing the benefits of the emerging mobility ecosystem. The journey has just begun, but we are moving swiftly toward this exciting future.

Endnotes

1 Scott Corwin et al., The future of mobility, Deloitte University Press, September 24, 2015; Corwin et al., The future of mobility: What's next?, Deloitte University Press, September 14, 2016.
2 Randolph W. Hall, Chethan Parekh, and Viral Thakker, “Intermodal Transportation Operation System (ITOS) for the state of California,” California PATH Working Paper UCB-ITS-PWP-98-28, University of Southern California, November 1998.
3 Matt Leonard, “Columbus lays groundwork for connected transportation data exchange,” GCN, October 6, 2017.
4 Singapore Land Transport Authority, “Intelligent Transport Systems,” accessed September 6, 2017.
5 Mike Cooray and Rikke Duus, “Technology is not enough to create connected cities—here’s why,” Conversation, August 23, 2017.
6 Warwick Goodall et al., “The rise of mobility as a service,” Deloitte Review 20, January 23, 2017.
7 Sentilo, “Exciting projects based on Sentilo in the SCEWC 2016,” December 29, 2016.
8 Barcelona Municipal Institute of Computing, “City OS,” accessed December 21, 2017.
9 Smart Dubai, “Introducing the new digital backbone of Dubai–Smart Dubai Platform,” December 2016.
10 Excerpted from Goodall et al., “The rise of mobility as a service.”

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