The European Green Deal is a great opportunity for cycling and ITS
The BITS project partner Cycling Industries Europe (CIE) formalised in March 2020 the Connected Cycling and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS)Expert Group (CC-ITS EG)with around 20 companies actively participating.
This is right on time, because the EU Commission and many other partners are beating a path to ask for expertise and coordination from across the whole cycling sector, from connected bikes to collecting data on cycle use for cities.
This burst of energy in the ITS sector has definitely been helped by the publication of the EU Green Deal and the recent passage into legislation of the EU Climate Law. There is a huge need to transform transport emissions in the EU as part of the deal with strong actions on local and urban transport.
The CC-ITS EG has the coordinating role for all aspects of ITS policy, and in particular the interface with the EU and Member States processes for ITS.
To respond to these challenges the CIE Expert Group has decided to start working and cataloguing the initiatives and opportunities for cycling ITS under four provisional headings which will help the next steps of their advocacy and projects.
- MaaS - Mobility as a Service – working with the CIE Bike Share Expert Group and supported by a new CIE membership of the world-leading Mobility as a Service Alliance which brings into MaaS Experts from all sectors.
- Bike technology and tools improving rider experience. Working with companies that create applications, devices, routing, gamification, reporting, on-bike control systems, automation etc. to build an overall catalogue of smart cycling technologies.
- Connected, collaborative and automated mobility (CCAM) is a big and complex field which includes all the EU regulatory work on automated driving. In this area CIE’s partner CONEBI are leading the cycling industry representation on the EU’s CCAM Platform, so CIE will support them as needed.
- The fourth work area is data. This is both a huge topic in its own right, but also a cross-cutting topic to ensure that the data needs of the three areas above are supported and coordinated to drastically improve cycling policies and anchoring cycling in broader mobility policies and share this data for multimodal future. This work will also feed the CyclingDataHub (cycledatahub.eu) in the BITS-project.
The Experts taking part in the group have already identified political and business benefits to the sector to coordinate the work of cycling businesses in a structured way, exactly in line with the overall mission of CIE and CIE’s support for the BITS project.