New-Tech Europe | March 2019

dangerous situations on the cycle paths which both electric and standard bikes have to use. It’s difficult to fix this because the more static urban planning doesn’t allow to flexibely adjust the allocation of spaces. But Smart City technology can help here by making the static purpose of certain locations within the city more flexible. This may depend on the weather, time of day, pressure of traffic, etc. For example, the center traffic lane can run one way in the morning and the other way in the evening. Or one traffic lane for cars becomes a cycle path in the morning, close to a school, or a car park becomes a basketball court at the weekend – and so on. And, by gathering data, visualizing traffic flows, centrally controlling digital signboards above the road, automatically installing and removing traffic bollards, etc., the way the city is organized can be made more flexible and efficient. Of course, for this to happen, the various departments within the city will have to work very closely together and aim to achieve a common goal. Every district should have its own letterbox 2.0 These days, it’s not just our own cars that clog city traffic, but also the delivery vehicles needed to bring our online orders to us. Different delivery companies all work independently from each other, yet they sometimes need to deliver packages to the same place. Urban logistics such as this could be a lot more efficient and in the future, more and better integration should certainly be possible. As a result, collaboration between the various providers will

Fig 3: Mobility as a service’ will be the trend of the (near) future. Using a single app, we will be able to organize our whole journey: buy a train ticket, hire a shared electric bike for long distances from the station to the nearby town or city, ride off on a shared scooter in the busy city, etc. One example is the Whim app, which is currently used in Helsinki, Birmingham and Antwerp. [copyright: Whim]

Fig 4: The supply of shared vehicles in the city will increase enormously. An example is the current popularity of shared scooters, like Troty. [copyright Troty]

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