By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, an increase of about 50 percent today. Over the same period, more than two billion people are likely to enter the middle class, with the majority of them living in cities in emerging markets. Existing urban infrastructure cannot support such an increase in vehicles on the road and solving the mobility challenge will require bold, coordinated actions from the private and public sectors for gaining public acceptance of emerging technological solutions and creating new regulatory frameworks across Europe and beyond.

In this framework, ERTICO’s Senior Manager Piia Karjalainen spoke at the event “The Role of Cities in the Smart Mobility Economy”, organised by Durham University and Emlyon Business School, with the support of ERTICO to present ERTICO’s proposed solutions to urban mobility challenges. “To solve urban mobility problems that are expected to intensify in the future, ERTICO is well positioned thanks to ERTICO’s status as public-private Partnership, which gathers today 120 Partners with different backgrounds”, said Ms. Karjalainen.

“The role of the cities is to balance between enabling and framing, and thus set the right conditions for the deployment of smart mobility. With the word enabling I refer to the creation of attractive preconditions for smart mobility innovations. On the other side, it is also important for cities to set the right framework so that new solutions don’t only benefit the users but societies as whole”, she continued.

From mobility as a service (MaaS) to drones, discussions focussed also on what seems to be the current evolution of smart mobility in cities. “ERTICO has gained a clear understanding that urban air mobility has to be seen as a part of the urban mobility system, which is therefore no longer to be considered only ground transportation or vehicle-based mobility. Urban mobility should now include underground, on the ground and above the ground transportation, with MaaS being a way to combine all these mobility services”.

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