The challenge of implementing smart mobility projects: How to engage with providers?
14/04/2021
The first generation of new Shared Mobility options such as car, bike, scooter-sharing, autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing, and MaaS concepts allows users to access and pay for a variety of multimodal options as needed. New mobility providers rise quickly and enter cities every day. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for cities to collaborate effectively with the private sector to take advantage of the potential of new innovative mobility modes.
What topics should be addressed?
For cities to implement smart mobility concepts, five main themes must be considered and developed in mutual coherence and with ongoing alignment with private mobility providers.
City Strategies & Goals: The cities’ social environmental and economic mobility targets.
Mobility Solutions: Commercially available mobility solutions that are most suitable to help a city fulfilling its strategies and reaching its goals.
Engagement Types: The pre-commercial forms with which providers of mobility solutions are engaged to (co-)develop the mobility solutions and governance models (e.g. directly launching tender, competitive dialogue, design contest).
Governance models: The approach used to influence how the market and operations are structured in line with the city goals (e.g permit structures, licensing, free-market).
Public-Private Partnership: Commercial relationship between the city and the mobility provider (e.g tech-only partnership, turnkey solution, encourage private market presence) including how the business case of the mobility provider is supported or not by the city.
A transnational approach
As a city, to obtain the required knowledge to develop their implementation strategy, partnerships with mobility providers, insights and experience from other cities and experts from different regions and countries are crucial. A good example is here at the Future Mobility Expert partnership which prevents the local authorities from “reinventing the wheel” themselves again and to further support the implementation of innovative and new mobility solutions such as MaaS, shared- and autonomous mobility.
How does it work?
The MOBI-MIX implementation guide provides cities with tools and examples of how they can improve this collaboration and unlock the positive potential of Shared Mobility solutions. The guide includes various state-of-the-art tools, examples and case studies on how to improve especially the collaboration with the private sector.
Case examples: What are cities looking for?
Currently, (digital) workshops are being held with cities to support their local mobility project and their public-private collaborations, with the help of the developed Smart Mobility guide. To consider different procurement strategies for a mid-sized city in the UK for the development of various Mobility Hubs in the urban environment where many providers are available and where both the challenge and solution are perceived to be highly innovative. Another recent example from a German city in their consideration for effective public-private collaboration is to develop a platform that is focused on neutral mobility data.
Besides the above, future work will focus on enhancing the Smart Mobility Guide specifically by diving deeper into viable business cases in cities and how suitable governance models can contribute to that.