The Mobility Dashboard
The mobility dashboard collocates data in a way that enables those working on various challenges within mobility to use it as a tool.The Challenge
The city of Bergen is going through an enormous transformation from one transportation pattern based on private fossil-fueled cars in the suburbs to an inner-city based fossil-free and sustainable mode of transportation. There are many movable parts. Bergen is physically reconstructing the city at the same time as they are adopting new technology to prepare for an uncertain future.
The aim of implementing the mobility dashboard is to collocate data in a way that enables those working on various challenges within mobility, to use it as a tool.
Explore the mobility dashboard here
It is not crucial that the mobility dashboard is visible to the public. The most important is to have better services within mobility and urban planning. The mobility dashboard is a part of a greater entirety. The current challenges are that the existing traffic data are not very accessible to the planners.
The Solution
The solution is dual; the first part is to collect data in a data lake enabling advanced analysis and modeling on the data, the second is to design a mobility dashboard on top of the data to have a simple presentation of the data and do simple analysis.
The data platform also enables more complex analysis for more complex approaches to a problem, such as developing new mobility concepts where information is needed as to where many people are going by bus, for instance, and where there is available road capacity. Complex models must be designed to explore future solutions within mobility.
Data are collected; some manually, some from Skyss, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, Bergen bysykkel, Ferde, Statistics Norway and the Central Motor Vehicles Register.
All the data are entered in the data lake, some in a near real-time. Everything is collected in the tool PowerBI, which is a sort of Excel on steroids. The data lake also contains other, more advanced tools.
The idea behind the visualization is to make the data easily accessible to many people. The mobility dashboard is not meant to be a fantastic service as such, rather to be a tool to make fantastic services.
Bergen is looking at the possibility for making this a national solution, and we would like it to be scalable nationwide. In terms of SCORE and replicating internationally, there might be challenges ahead that we are not aware of in Norway.
Our current status
Presently we have a pilot out, and we are awaiting feedback from the users, primarily the Urban Environment Agency. We see that both Skyss and the county municipality will benefit from the access, so the mobility dashboard is indeed catering to a need.
The next step is to make it available for everyone and supply with more data sources, as well as enhancing the visualization of the map material.
Fitting into the SCORE-project
The Mobility Dashboard is about mobility and re-using open data; making open data more available for practical use. Placing the data into new contexts makes it more valuable.
Ambitions after SCORE
Bergen aims at making the Mobility Dashboard a national vibrant tool that will be further developed. For society we already see how useful this is in terms of planning the charging infrastructure for electric cars. The same goes for planning car-free parts of town as much as possible.
In terms of biking, the use of this project is more uncertain. But we will at least be able to measure how many people are riding bikes.
The most important, though, is the large restructuring of the city, from a car-based city to a city based on environment-friendly transport. In this “new” city many people will need a lot of data to make suitable decisions and route choices.
Captions:
To become a fossil free city in 2030 and make the city better to live in, Bergen is implementing more sustainable modes of transportation. Here in the former industrial area of Mindemyren, a new line of the Bergen Light Rail is being built, and at the same time: parks, recreational areas and open waterways.
The team behind it
This is an interdisciplinary collaboration within the municipality between the Climate section, the Urban environment agency, the digitalization and innovation section (SDI) and the data lake project (partly consisting of workers on contract). The mobility dashboard is designed in cooperation with MUST, where the county municipality, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration and Skyss participate alongside the municipality.
Contact
Camilla Bolstad: Camilla.Bolstad@bergen.kommune.no
