The #VisionaryCities Series is a collection of best practices and success stories from visionary local authority leaders who contribute to make Cycling in Europe better, safer and more common. We are going to be inviting some of them to share their thoughts and visions with ECF.com in the coming months.

Stijn Vernaillen works for the City of Antwerp on the EU-funded project CIVITAS PORTIS. He supports Mobility-as-a-Service providers and mobility providers in launching their offer in the city. As part of the PORTIS project, Stijn is also setting up a back-office for mobility data which will be usable for various stakeholders and will help evaluating policy measures. 

Making shared, sustainable mobility accessible for everyone

Meet Vince. Vince lives just outside of the City of Antwerp, works at the newly developed Eilandje and likes to move around in the city but hates to choose. For years Vince has been struggling with multiple apps, cards, cash payments and quirky selling machines which made him consider just buying a car – luckily, the massive roadworks around the city and many traffic jams have kept him away from car ownership for now. Vince will no longer have to choose a mode nor struggle with cards. Since September 2018, he’s now able to use one app that does it all in an intermodal way. Car, bike, bus, train, scooter… are all just a swipe of his finger away.

Mobility is a matter of convenience. Like Vince, people want to feel free to move around. For a long time, the car was seen as the sole solution to satisfy that need. In most cities however, this car-use has put tremendous stress on the whole (road) infrastructure. In Antwerp, this causes long traffic jams and has a negative impact on the attractiveness of the city related to employment, tourism and logistics. To tackle this challenge, the city of Antwerp started the “Smart Ways to Antwerp” project in which we developed various measures and tools to accomplish a mind-, modal- and time-shift for people mobility and logistics.

Antwerp takes the lead on Smart Mobility

Since just providing unimodal information was not an option, a new route planner was developed together with Be-Mobile, a market leader in smart mobility. This new route planner combines all transport modes offered within the City of Antwerp based on various user scenarios: combinations of car, public transport, Park & Ride, bikeshare, walking are made and presented to the end-user through the website or through a dedicated app. This has made it easy to know when to take which bikeshare to which train station in order to get to that one bus that drops you off in front of your house or get suggestions on where to drop off your car at a Park & Ride and continue your journey by tram to get to that wonderful restaurant.

A nice side-effect of the development of the route planner by the city authority is that it is easy to influence the routing logic. All events that influence mobility, are tracked somewhere within the city administration. By linking those sources to the route planner, even better routing advice can be given to the end-user. Next to providing more accurate data to the routing algorithms, it’s also possible to define certain parameters that influence the routing advice. The city can define certain user scenarios which should not be suggested (e.g. taking the car from within the city to the central train station) or certain parameters which should weight in harder (attractiveness for Park & Rides). A next step that is being developed is to combine the parameters defined by the city with preferences of the user. This will make it possible to give travel advice to the end-user which is in line with both his expectations and with the city’s objectives.

Step 1: Sorting out the commercial uncertainties

Giving people solid travel advice is important to help them towards a modal and mind shift but without the proper mobility solutions Vince would buy a car. To solve this challenge, Smart Ways to Antwerp has set up a Mobility Marketplace. On a basic level it brings together all the players in the mobility field who help the city reach its mobility goals. Approved organisations can use the logo of “Smart Ways to Antwerp” in their communication and they are given some attention on the website in the form of articles. However, the Marketplace goes much further than that.

In the project call, organisations are asked to come up with innovative solutions for the various mobility challenges in Antwerp, and in return they can get up to € 50.000/project based on pre-defined KPIs, and support from the city administration in realising their goals and launching their solution in Antwerp. For the 2017 call, various MaaS-providers were approved and supported, and in partnership with them, the city of Antwerp built up knowledge towards standardisation and reporting but also a solid knowledge of what the end user really needs. It became clear that, although there were some serious technical challenges involved, finding the right way to influence behavioural change that is in line with the city goals requires close collaboration and clear reporting with all the players in the field of MaaS.

Conclusions

The figure on the right was inspired on the model presented in the European project ECCENTRIC, and shows the readiness of the City of Antwerp for developing MaaS (and this publication makes for a good blueprint for cities looking at improving their own readiness).

It’s clear that Antwerp is a true frontrunner in the field of MaaS, since most of the indicators (5 out of 8) score at the highest level. Although, other cities interested in leveraging the same or similar tools to reach their mobility goals shouldn’t be scared off by that table: ECF Cities and Regions for Cyclists can be a key resource in liaising with the right authorities and supporting the development and implementation of your local Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan.