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The EU-funded OPTICITIES project, launched in November 2013, has developed and tested a series of ITS solutions designed to optimise the movement of people and goods in urban areas. The ultimate goal is to improve the urban environment and expand the market for European SMEs in the ITS solutions sector.

Since early February 2016, project partners and local end-users in six partner cities have been conducting pilot tests of 14 new ITS services, which will feed into guidelines to help replicate the results across Europe. These new tools aim to achieve a 6 % shift from private to public transport in six targeted urban areas by 2020: Lyon, France; Birmingham, UK; Gothenburg, Sweden; Madrid, Spain; Turin, Italy; and Wroclaw, Poland.

Green light for innovations

The pilots are the culmination of almost three years of intense research and development. Partner cities have developed innovative systems and ways of collecting quality transport data, which will help transport users, network managers and local decision-makers to identify and select the most sustainable and efficient transport solutions. The availability of more urban data will also give IT companies the opportunity to develop new services for urban mobility.

"We estimate that increasing data quality, data access and improving information services will boost the European ITS solutions market by an additional '211 million per year," says project coordinator Jean Coldefy from the Urban Mobility Department of Lyon Metropole, France. For example, the project has developed a multimodal mobile app, which communicates with in-car navigation systems and has the potential to be replicated across European cities. Other multimodal information services will help to improve connections between various modes of public transportation and provide commuters with real-time information through a mobile app.

Combinations of live traffic data feeds with high-speed simulations of congestion mitigation strategies are also being tested. These will enable network managers to foresee and influence vehicle movement and travel behaviour within a city. Birmingham is applying this module in order to provide predictive travel time information to users. A multimodal navigator for urban travellers is also currently being tested in Lyon, Madrid, Turin and Gothenburg.

Sustainable benefits for all

The project team has calculated that the implementation of these new tools, together with optimising transport networks, will lead to a change in mobility habits and translate into a reduction of some 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in the six cities combined. OPTICITIES also aims to achieve a 10 % decrease in car use, generating a gain of around 3.6 million square metres of public space within the participating cities.

"Intelligent urban mobility will help cities to become more environmentally sustainable," says Coldefy. "Transport generates some 30 % of CO2 and micro-particle emissions, of which 95 % come from cars and trucks. In most cities, around 50 % of car journeys cover distances of less than 3 km. Long-term objectives require strong and coordinated actions, and a service approach to optimise existing infrastructure is needed to meet increasing mobility demand. This is what this project aims to achieve."

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