The Be-Mobile collaboration empowers the Smart City vision of Istanbul to become a significant player in intelligent transportation systems and traffic management systems together with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM), Istanbul IT and Smart City Technologies Inc. (ISBAK).

As part of realizing the Smart City vision of Istanbul, ISBAK together with IMM went looking for a way to further enrich their already extensive traffic data and thereby improving the quality of their traffic information service. And this is where Be-Mobile came into view to deliver outstanding traffic information content. By addressing the needs of public authorities, private businesses and individual travellers, Be-Mobile provides a reliable overview of traffic conditions covering the entire road network using the total traffic management approach.

Jan Cools, CEO of Be-Mobile, said “During this pandemic, the amount of traffic increased significantly. Finding the best way to get to work and managing traffic has been a major undertaking, a challenge we have met with our world-class information and solutions.” 

Istanbul, with its population of more than 15 million, is Turkey’s largest city and one of the top 5 cities most impacted by traffic. The key difficulty ISBAK faced was that their traffic data density was not sufficient to optimally manage traffic. With the current infrastructure, it was impractical to extract enough data from the roadside infrastructure and incidental reports. One possible solution involved placing additional sensors at many locations, but that proved to be especially cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. Be-Mobile proposed the total traffic management approach to better utilise the current infrastructure and use Floating Car Data (FCD), an anonymised localisation data collected from devices in vehicles driving on the road, reporting location information, speed and direction. 

With travel times, traffic flow data and Be-Mobile’s Traffic Events Manager, the data quality has increased in the services they developed. Given the more reliable information on significant digital traffic signs, it is a satisfactory outcome that allows sharing directly with millions of Istanbul drivers traffic applications.

Dr Johanna Tzanidaki, Director of Innovation and Deployment, ERTICO – ITS Europe said “ERTICO is endorsing the traffic management approach of its partner Be-Mobile in Istanbul and as one of the leading traffic businesses within the ERTICO Innovation Platform TM2.0 on interactive traffic management. The use of FCD and other tools for real-time services is transforming Istanbul’s traffic flows. It promotes a better quality of life by keeping drivers better informed and giving the public authorities a clearer picture of the road networks. It is also one of the pioneer companies in ensuring that managing traffic is a process that can, and should, benefit all stakeholders, public and private, alike“. 

Having built a close relationship with the City of Istanbul through ITS innovation projects under H2020 and established excellent cooperation with Turkish ERTICO partners, such as Ford Otosan, Okan University, the Turkish Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, and the ITS Turkey, ERTICO had the opportunity to offer training on ITS and its benefits back in September 2020 to the city public authorities under the ERTICO Academy initiative. Dr Tzanidaki commented on the development and said “ERTICO is proud to see the successful deployment of ITS at the city level by both the public and the private sector, answering the city’s real needs and its citizens. We are looking forward to more cities in Turkey successfully deploying ITS and following the leading example of Istanbul and Be-Mobile.“

Initial Source: Be-Mobile