The success and outreach of the City Moonshot initiative is a result of cooperation between more than 200 public and private entities. This cooperation includes the representatives of the 150 interviewed cities, on this first phase, who have offered their time and expertise for the planning as well as for the interviews. The City Moonshot is an initiative launched and led by ERTICO-ITS Europe aiming to increase the understanding of how cities worldwide are responding to current and future challenges in mobility and transport. More specifically, the initiative investigates how cities are addressing challenges such as sustainability, climate change, air quality, digitalisation, multimodality and how to meet the needs of their citizens.
Following the discussions within the ERTICO partnership, the City Moonshot initiative was launched in early 2020 with an ambition to gather and share information on the needs, challenges and solutions of cities worldwide, for the mutual benefit of all cities, as well as, other actors in the transport and mobility sector, such as industry, service providers and researchers. To this end, the initiative has been developed as a series of semi-structured interviews with senior managers and/ or directors responsible for transport and mobility in their city or metropolitan council. In the first phase of the activity (May 2020 – November 2021), the City Moonshot conducted 150 interviews out of the targeted 300.
“As far as we know, the City Moonshot is a unique initiative, whereby in the first phase we spoke with more than 150 cities and their senior representatives on topics of sustainability and air quality, data sharing and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). The results of these conversations are in front of you” says Joost Vantomme, ERTICO CEO. “We sincerely hope you will enjoy reading, and perhaps come back to the report as a useful reference in finding out what are the main challenges and objectives of our urban agglomerations, what they think about data sharing and MaaS, and many more questions and answers”.
Global Survey Results: Achievements of Phase I
The achievement is a great success with more than 100 cities interviewed located in Europe, and approximately 50 cities dotted around the globe, from New Zealand to California, from South Africa to Japan. The evidence of the successful completion of Phase I was an overwhelming interest demonstrated at the 27th ITS World Congress in Hamburg in October 2021. During the Congress, the ERTICO Partnership was praised for opening an important dialogue between the public sector agencies managing transport and mobility in cities and regions around the world and their counterparts in the industry. ERTICO has acted as a catalyst for this exchange of best practices and needs of cities, asking 58 questions relevant to the most pressing topics and giving voice to those with a mandate to implement mobility solutions at the local and city-region level.
Common challenges and shared goals
The data collected during Phase I of the City Moonshot initiative demonstrates the reasons why cities located in different countries and continents are implementing similar measures, the underlying challenges are the same. Indeed, 61% of the cities indicated traffic congestion as their primary challenge in terms of mobility, followed by pollution and noise, lack of budget/resources, and resistance to change by their citizens. Unsurprisingly, similar challenges are reflected in the mobility goals shared by all cities interviewed, the top three being: improving the public transport system (79% of the cities), improving air quality (68%) and decarbonising mobility in the City (68%). While air quality has been recognised as a key priority for cities for many years, the City Moonshot initiative shows that transport decarbonisation needs, driven by the climate crisis, are considered equally important by the city transport and mobility professionals.
Learn more about the City Moonshot Initiative and download the full report here.
