SMART CONNECTIVITY AND DIGITALISATION TRANSFORMING CYCLING
Delegates from more than 90 leading companies gathered together for the first Connected Cycling and Intelligent Transport Systems Expert Conference and Think Tank on 2 December in Antwerp. Organised by Cycling Industries Europe (CIE) in partnership with the Province of Antwerp as part of a stakeholder engagement under the BITS project, the event aimed at exploring the potential for an industry wide Roadmap for intelligent cycling systems to guide future strategies for building a collaborative industry community in Smart, Digital and Connected Cycling. The overall objective is to advocate and ensure that cycling is included in the EU’s ITS policies and to stimulate cycling with the use of ITS.
Ronald Jorna from Province of Overijssel presented the BITS project highlighting the pilot projects and referring to opportunities for collaboration. He invited the audience to get involved in the BITS Community if they have Apps they would like to be considered for testing. The BITS project partner cities have already an implementation plan, but additional Apps that would help stimulate cycling could be further evaluated.
Tina Caers from Province of Antwerp made a presentation on data sharing, open data, big data, data standards and related opportunities referring also to the CycleDataHub (open data platform) to be developed under the BITS project.
The conference participants were excited to see that there were multiple opportunities to take the ITS area further in order to funnel EU grants and funding to cycle-friendly projects. If working well together and showing the regulators what cycling and ITS can deliver in the transport section, it is estimated that the European Commission could budget up to € 6 billion for cycle-industry related initiatives in the next term.
In the afternoon three parallel workshops took place focusing on
- Bike sharing, ITS and multimodality
- Cooperative, Connected, Automated and Autonomous Mobility
- Data sharing, open data, big data, data standards – what’s the opportunity?
It became very clear that this stakeholder get-together was only the beginning, and that cross-industry collaboration is needed to bring ITS and sustainable mobility on another level.
Click here to see agenda of the conference.
Click here to see presentations of the day.
Click here to see photo gallery of the event.