The ERTICO Partnership team working on the City Moonshot held an exclusive webinar with Partners about the findings from interviews carried out with the first 50 cities. The ERTICO City Moonshot is an initiative targeting 300 city interviews worldwide – 200 cities in Europe, 25 China & SE Asia, 25 North and 25 South America, 25 Africa and the rest of Asia and Oceania. It aims to understand current needs and plans for the future regarding sustainability (air quality and climate change), data sharing and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). The overall goal of the City Moonshot is to ensure the ERTICO Partnership improves cooperation and collaboration between the public and private sectors that ultimately leads to the faster uptake of intelligent transport solutions.
The event was hosted by ERTICO’s Senior Manager – Vlad Vorotovic who chaired the panel which included– ERTICO’s Deputy Director of Innovation and Deployment Zeljko Jeftic, Support Manager Lidia Buenavida Peña, and a special guest Precilia Godart, the Global Partnership Officer at Connected Places Catapult – one of 120 ERTICO partners. The webinar provided the background for the initiative, presented the current results of the survey, and gave an overview of the next steps for this ambitious City Moonshot initiative.
Zeljko Jeftic gave an overview of how the initiative was created mentioning that the main objective of the initiative is to understand the needs and requirements of cities in relation to mobility and transport. ‘Urban environments were experiencing dramatic mobility changes caused by digitalisation and the climate crisis, even before COVID-19. The ERTICO Partnership, as a platform for public and private stakeholder cooperation, has the responsibility to define the sustainable mobility of the future. For this, the Partnership has to have the latest and in-depth understanding of arising mobility needs so that we can jointly make the right choices. To the best of our understanding the ERTICO City Moonshot is the widest interview-based survey with cities ever made on the topic of transport and mobility globally,’ says Zeljko Jeftic.
Following that, Lidia Buenavida Pena presented the insights of the first results from interviews with 50 cities. The survey shows that the main objective of transport and mobility in most cities is to improve air quality. More than a quarter of the respondents have already declared a climate emergency in their cities. Regarding data sharing, the majority of cities share data for free. The interest in cooperating with private entities to jointly elaborate and build new, innovative solutions based on their city’s data. The results show that most cities are prepared for MaaS, as most of the preconditions that could enable the MaaS rollout are met, the most common ones being: having an integrated ticketing system, the technology that can enable MaaS rollout and the possibility of sharing real-time travel information from different stakeholders.
Precilia Godart, Global Partnership Officer at Connected Places Catapult, presented the City Typologies Dashboard, a tool that is also used to investigate cities by the City Moonshot initiative. Precilia stated that cities are facing multiple challenges of urbanisation. This is why the dashboard aims at tracking cities’ systems and assets, ecosystems and enterprise dynamics, strategic capacity and ambition. By having all this data, it is easier to understand at what stage the particular city is on its innovation journey. The City Moonshot collaborates with the Connected Places Catapult to use the City Typologies Dashboard to add up data that is already available in the public domain to improve the final outcome of survey results.
The presentations were followed by the Q&A sessions, where the attendees were able to discover even more about the initiative.
Would you like your city to join the City Moonshot initiative? Please email: Vlad Vorotovic: v.vorotovic@mail.ertico.com
