The 13th-14th November saw the annual occurrence of the Cityx expo organised by connected places Catapult held in the Urban Innovation Centre in London.
It was another opportunity for uTrack as a company to connect with other like-minded innovators/companies working in the sector of city mobility and discuss the very real and growing problems of firstly how people will get around in the increasingly populated cities of the future and secondly how cities can realistically reduce their carbon footprints.
The day saw a series of keynote speeches and workshops along with opportunities to network with other companies with the potential to collaborate and share ideas.
Keynote speeches had a varied range of speakers and topics including:
- Rachel Skinner, the UK Head of Transport and an Executive Director of WSP who spoke on what is currently being done to combat the problems faced by cities regarding mobility and what is being proposed going forward.
- Iain Macbeth, used to head up Automotive & Intelligent Mobility team within Transport for London’s Innovation Directorate who outlined the three key pillars of the London mayors transport strategy and how this can be taken to other cities around the UK.
In addition to the keynotes, there were various workshops including;
- Alon Shantzer, VP International, Moovit who discussed how Mobility as a Service (MaaS) solutions are helping move people away from private car ownership, reducing congestion and making our cities better places to live and move around.
- Luke Rust, Head of Commercial Development, Immense Simulations who looked at whether the use of different modes of transport on the same journey, could offer greater efficiency and reduced congestion with the help of digitisation.
The big takeaway from the expo was that the issues of pollution and congestion can no longer be ignored. Action needs to happen now and fast. The solution to this issue is a combination of clean personal transport linking with clean mass public transport however the public transport industry needs to improve the consumer experience in order to make it a more desirable solution. Technology and more specifically data will allow companies to find the pain points and instantly improve current consumer problems but also accommodate for more efficiency problems they will face in the future.
We at uTrack will continue to bang this ‘Realtime Data Analysis’ drum and work to the best of our ability with our excellent clients and the rest of the transport industry to improve logistics and consumer perception before the problems of congestion and pollution become irreversible.
