Mobility Journeys
By: Carlos Luiz
Tags: Mobility, Smart Cities, Behavior, Sustainability, Citizen

The emergence of the automobile and the globalization of its use was perhaps one of the disruptions that most influenced the transformation of cities in the last century. Urban spaces were designed, implemented and rehabilitated in line with the development of accessibility, thinking about the use of the automobile as the primary transportation vehicle for the movement of persons and goods.

The mobility was, until the appearance of bottlenecks, delivered to the “user of the space” in the form of roads, signs, semaphore and parking that allowed them to access the urban centres, generators of employment, culture and leisure, for years and years. Today, the macrocephalies produced by this reality requests urgent actions to create new centralities; smooth means of transport to eliminate short-distance movements; public and shared transport to reduce the use of the automobile; electrification and alternative fuels to generate eco-efficiency.

Smart cities have different actors but the municipalities are the entities with more responsibilities in the management and transformation of the territory, delivering environment, quality of life, employment, public lighting, security, economic activity, education, transportation, water, sanitation,… and regardless of the “user of the space” perceptions its approach is across the citizen-centric value chain, conducted in a way that at the end of the day it delivers the best satisfaction to the citizen.

Geographical information technologies were the way to support this multisector decision making, locating “schizophrenically” all points of interest, stores and services, road network, housing, industry, tourism,…; integrating in geographic information systems all the polygons of the municipal planning; mapping flood, fire and accident risks; creating management applications based on the vertical consultation of this georeferenced information. Nowadays these actions are not enough and a citizen-centric approach must be focused on dynamically addressing demand and supply, as close as possible to real time, by studying behaviours and citizens journey.

Traffic data sustains the vision that the future will be made by analytical segmentation, where the traffic will continue to be, in the medium / long term, the variable with more significance in the definition of inter and intra municipality mobility patterns. The knowledge of these patterns for all the roads of the country, with time intervals of 5 minutes allows a characterization of the demand for mobility with an odd representation, attributing to the geometry of the network a dynamic faculty impossible of reaching before.

Today the mobility challenges, as far as it concerns to the actors, should focus on analysing data and citizens journeys, forecasting and spatializing trends, optimizing and relocating supply, planning and managing the territory based on analytics. A big step in the increase of the citizen’s perception of value depends on a cohesive and robust strategy, which definitely binds mobility to sustainable development, relying on the increasingly commoditized dynamism of geographic information technologies. The location is synonymous of value and spatial intelligence will continue to be one of the most impacting drivers when addressing the challenges of mobility.