Smart Cities are increasingly exploring ways to reduce the social, environmental and climate impact of their mobility/transportation options with sustainable mobility solutions.
There are many definitions of sustainable mobility (or sustainable transportation). One such definition, from the European Union Council of Ministers of Transport, defines a sustainable transportation system as one that:
- Allows the basic access and development needs of individuals, companies and society to be met safely and in a manner consistent with human and ecosystem health, and promotes equity within and between successive generations.
- Is affordable, operates fairly and efficiently, offers a choice of transport mode, and supports a competitive economy, as well as balanced regional development.
- Limits emissions and waste within the planet's ability to absorb them, uses renewable resources at or below their rates of generation, and uses non-renewable resources at or below the rates of development of renewable substitutes, while minimizing the impact on the use of land and the generation of noise.
The Azure Maps team participated in the Smart City Expo World Congress in November and was engaged in several conversations with City Planners on ways to drive sustainable mobility. Azure Maps, partners with best of breed content providers to make data that is critical for city planning available natively through its API. This includes mapping data and real time traffic data from TomTom, real time transit and ride share data from Moovit and current and forecast weather data from AccuWeather.
One of the Azure Maps content partnerships is with Moovit. Launched in 2011 in Israel, Moovit has become the world’s most popular transit-planning and navigation app, with more than 500 million users and service in over 3,000 cities across 94 countries. The company is also a leader in inclusive technology, with innovative work that helps people across the disability spectrum use buses, trains, subways, ride-hailing services, and other modes of public transit.
In addition to offering a consumer app in 45 languages, Moovit has partnered with Microsoft to provide its multi-modal transit data to developers who use Azure Maps, and a set of mobility-as-a-service solutions to cities, governments, and organizations. The partnership will enable the creation of more inclusive smart cities and more accessible & sustainable transit apps.
To showcase the multi-modal transit options as well as sustainable mobility options, the Azure Maps team partnered with Gus Salloum, a program manager in Microsoft, with a deep passion for finding creative ways of commuting to work in a sustainable way while getting his minimum physical activity goals accomplished by biking part of the way. Gus brought his ideas and vision to the annual Microsoft Hackathon, billed to be one of the biggest private hackathons on the planet, to help make his multimodal commute app real. To add the sustainability element he built out a costing algorithm for every commute option indicating the route and transport options environmental impact. A great example of how, many cities calculate the social and environmental impact of transportation can be found online from the City of Calgary.
You can find a detailed video walkthrough of Gus’s hackathon project at LINK
We would love to help city planners with sustainable mobility solutions for your cities.