Transport initiatives are gaining traction through well-designed websites.
Four European smart transport-oriented websites have gained honours in the 2016 .eu Web Awards, an online competition inaugurated in 2014 to recognise the most impressive sites within the .eu internet domain in terms of their design and content. The four were among 15 finalists across all five categories of the scheme, giving the transport sector a high profile for its proactive use of sites as communications tools for driving major European sustainability initiatives.
In the ‘Better World’ category, the winner was the European Mobility Week site, with
During the event, the city of Orléans, in France, launched a ‘geovelo’ app enabling local cyclists to plan their travel, with dedicated lane and quiet street options, and to locate bike sharing and parking points. Berlin, in Germany, showcased its ParkTAG app that uses predictive analytics to alert drivers to parking slots that, if not currently available, soon will be.
Skopje, in Macedonia, polled residents on their preferences for carpooling models in support of the EU-supported SocialCar project that is exploring new software aids for the mode.
The highest level of involvement in the week came in Austria (with 523 local authorities), followed by Spain (451) and Hungary (214). Spain has consistently shown strong interest in the scheme, arising from the need for solutions to the traffic congestion endemic in many of its small historic towns.
Among long-term results of earlier Mobility Weeks, the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, has initiated a four-year programme of recording large volumes of data on people’s travel behaviour, to help urban policymakers work towards achieving low-carbon economies.
Prior to the 2016 competition, the Mobility Week site had undergone a thorough overhaul, to produce a more user-friendly presence. According to chief web developer Gabriel Nock: “One of the challenges we faced was displaying the elements of the project in a way that does not overwhelm the user. We therefore decided to open a beta version to the public and invited feedback.”
GrowSmarter, coordinated by the Swedish capital of Stockholm, is a five-year, €25 million (US$26.75 million) programme that aims to highlight ways of cutting energy use across Europe by 60% and as part of the that, reducing the use of unsustainable road transport. Starting in 2015, it is fostering the roll-out of up to 12 smart solutions over a five-year period. On the menu are sustainable travel; better-connected urban mobility, advanced information and communications; and smart street lights that can act as communications hubs and EV charging points.
The main focus is on three European ‘lighthouse cities’ – Barcelona, Cologne and Stockholm - all of which are routinely documenting their progress on the web. Cologne’s Mülheim district is acting as an urban laboratory for concepts such as mobility hubs that, planned close to people’s homes, offer a choice of informed travel options and are expected to play an increasingly important role in the city’s urban design process.
Barcelona is developing a green parking ‘index’ linked with a car-sharing pool of electric vehicles.
Stockholm is implementing a smart waste collection system, developed by Swedish company Envac, that will take heavy vehicles off the roads. It will operate through residential-area networks of dump points for the disposal of pre-sorted and bagged material, which is compacted before being sucked through buried pneumatic tubes to a remote collecting station.
GrowSmarter is prioritising continent-wide knowledge exchange and transfer through a web-supported replication effort. This is zooming in on specific lighthouse solutions and highlighting their potential for take-up in other, smaller urban areas.
Specifically, the project has nominated five ‘follower’ cities. One of these is Suceava, in Romania, a historic centre that has recently been experiencing an explosion in private car use, resulting in unwelcome rises in local air pollution. It is planning to set up a charging infrastructure and dedicated parking system for electric vehicles, which will support car sharing and cargo biking.
The message that CEO Mikael Colville-Andersen is communicating via his blog acknowledges that “we are in the midst of a veritable bicycle boom all over the world.” But, he says, “modern bicycle advocacy is, by and large, flawed. It is firmly inspired by environmentalism. Maintaining our current momentum and resecuring the bicycle’s place in our cities will only be achieved if we focus on marketing urban cycling as a normal activity for regular citizens.”
The company is developing a series of ‘-ize’ sites (on the analogy of Copenhagenize), that focus on individual cities in three continents that Colville-Andersen believes have scope for better provision for cycling.
Among finalists in the ‘Laurels’ category, which acknowledges educational and charitable institutions that support pan-European aims, was the site of the EU’s
The key tool is a series of web-supported active mobility campaigns. This approach involves potential public transport users being identified according to pre-researched criteria, contacted by phone or email and then offered travel information that draws on material accessible from the project website.
The process has succeeded in putting pressure on rural transport operators to overcome their traditional reluctance to offer combined service information, coordinated or integrated ticketing options. It has worked to establish partnerships of providers that can act as single sources for travellers’ travel advice.
It has also identified a clear need for feeder systems, that will link hinterland regions with existing backbone bus or rail networks and so fill the gaps being left by often shrinking bus networks and overcome the problem of the ‘first rural mile’. Users could then be encouraged to ride a rented pedelec (power-assisted e-bike) to a secure ‘bike-and-ride’ parking lot at a transit stop.
The availability of single end-to-end payment will be key to smoothing the journey, while real-time communication with users, via the web or smartphones, will be needed to afford them a degree of flexibility in their travel.
One of the success stories featured on the site comes from a local area of Austria’s rural Waldviertel region, where newly-launched bus services were attracting disappointingly low numbers of additional passengers. An early example of an active mobility campaign success resulted in growing the ridership by 14%.
In a follow-up survey, 84% of respondents (67% of whom were not regular public transport users asked for better service information to help them decide on whether to switch from driving to using the bus. The scheme has since been rolled out across other parts of the region, with the aim of squeezing the highest possible use out of existing services.
The presentations, made in Brussels on 16 November 2016, followed judging by an international panel of communications specialists. Running the awards is EURid, the EC-appointed registry manager of the .eu country code domains. It states that entrants that do well typically go on to benefit from increased visibility and website traffic.
Readers of ITS International can test their own opinions against those of the judges by looking up the successful websites, listed in the story.
