Building upon ERTICO’s close ties with the EU Delegation to Turkey and ITS-Turkey, Director of Innovation and Deployment Dr. Johanna Tzanidaki was in Ankara last week at the Smart Cities and Municipalities Congress and Exhibition to share ERTICO’s future vision for mobility in cities.

Representatives from 200 Turkish central and local administrations and Municipalities together with NGOs, academia and IT companies came together for a two-day event to discuss the current trends, challenges and solutions in smart cities at the event.

“Mobility is a system, and all modes should be integrated in it. If we make sure that the modes are ‘green’ in their operations and the management of these operations is optimal, we can achieve a greener mobility management. Clearly no one can do it alone. Targets have to be achieved through public-private sector cooperation.” said Dr. Tzanidaki.

In addition, ERTICO presented some of the main areas on which the Partnership will be working on in 2020: smart cities, sustainability and international cooperation, MaaS and smart Traffic Management. In particular, ERTICO will engage with 300 cities globally to identify the greatest mobility challenges and create a new mobility wave across Europe thanks to integrated mobility services, which can be a solution to issues such as increasing air pollution and inefficient transport.

Dr. Tzanidaki also explained how ERTICO and its Partners work to achieve these goals throughout European-funded projects, such as ELVITEN and the platforms MaaS Alliance and TM2.0 to make mobility in cities greener, more efficient and smarter.

At the event, it was stressed that common goals of making transport greener, and safer cannot be achieved without multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration. It is important to stay in touch with technological changes but avoid a patchwork of technology-related protocols and standards, especially when it comes to interoperability. ERTICO supports the strategy of Turkey in ITS, to avoid pilot projects that do not focus on sustainable impact.

Given cooperation is entrenched in ERTICO’s DNA, 2020 will be a year full of opportunities to meet transport and innovation stakeholders, starting at the ITS European Congress in Lisbon (May 18-20), where ERTICO will bring together the sector to make ITS the game changer.