Smart Mobility Belgium: proposals we joined.

Belgian ministers of Digital Agenda (Alexander Decroo) and Mobility (François Bellot) invest 4 million Euro in smart mobility by granting subsidies to innovative and sustainable projects. MORE LION took part in three proposals. August 28th, 2018 the winning projects will be announced. We 'd already like to give you a transparent insight in the strong projects we participate in.

Open Data Velopark Belgium

Fietsberaad Vlaanderen and the major interest / advocacy organisations for cyclists are convinced that an overarching, unified platform for bicycle (parking) data is a basic condition for the use of (electric) bikes for commuting, Mobility as a Service and an increased modal shift towards the combination of bicycle + public transport.

Fietsberaad and its partners will recycle as much as possible what was done for the veiligistallen.nl platform in The Netherlands and bring the lessons learned to Belgium.
Together with the Fietsersbond, Provelo, Gracq en Fietsenwerk, data on bicycle parking will be semantically published on the sites of the local governments / parking owners in Belgium, harvested and centrally released as standardised open data by the open data team of IMEC.
A good-looking and user-friendly map (comparable to veiligstallen.nl) will be developed by Nazka and the data will be shared with multimodal routeplanners and GPS systems so safe and convenient bicycle parkings will be a part of multimodal journeys offered to users.
As a proof of the need for this platform, Fietsberaad Vlaanderen invests 75.000 Euro in this project, The city of Antwerp, Leuven and Ghent together invest 20.000 Euro and the project is also backed up by the industrial federation Agoria, companies Traxio, Cycloparking, The New Drive and the Flemish Department of Mobility and Public works.

More Lion will assist Fietsberaad Vlaanderen in project management of the technical tasks, make an analysis of the efforts done in The Netherlands regarding payment of bike storage and linking cyclists to their bicycle. More Lion will also make a planning for the project afterlife and next steps to be taken.

Open Data Mobility Dashboard

It  is disheartening to see that the reuse level of datasets on public open data portals is currently extremely low, because: 
1/ the data is is offered in formats very hard to understand for ‘normal’ people without tech skills and
2/ most important, it lacks any form of imagination: it is unclear what real-world things are described with the data, or what use cases can be achieved with it.

In our experience, making the data tangible, visible and sexy is the step needed for the data to be used - for example, the mobility dashboard for the city of Ghent  on www.verkeer.gent. It contains open data that had been online for years. After just one day, the dashboard had more visitors than people ever looked at the datasets all these years before. The project immediately sparked enthusiasm in private, public and academic sectors to start working with the data.

During this project, Waylay.io and More Lion will prove this approach works for big economical hotspots in Belgium and build real-time open data dashboards for partners Brussels Airport, The port of Antwerp and Brussels-Capital Region.

By disclosing real-time mobility data, we give employees, customers and visitors an overview of the mobility situation in these crucial Belgian hotspots (traffic delays, number of vehicles, train delays, bus deviations, air quality, weather info, ..) by using existing open data and adding sources where necessary (delays at customs at Brussels Airport, open bridges in the Port of Antwerp, Parking occupation in Brussels).
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We believe this is a straightforward project that can be of absolute use to show the power of real-time (open) data to the large number of visitors of these hotspots on the one hand (715.000 people working in Brussels, 1.175.000 million people live there, 25.000.000 people pass through Brussels Airport every year) and the general public on the other hand.

More Lion will do the analysis of the data, defining the use cases and visualisations with Brussels Airport, Port of Antwerp and Brussels Capital-Region, document the datasources and project learnings + write a tender text for others that want to publish their data in similar ways.

​Mobipunt / Point Mob 2.0

A mobihub (mobipunt in Dutch / point mob in French) is a transport hub based at a neighbourhood level, where different sustainable and shared transport modes are linked. It is designed to enable and promote multimodal transport on a local level and can be tailored for different neighbourhoods. Mobihubs are being developed in Flanders and will be promoted throughout the whole country. The aim of this proposal is to digitize the mobihubs, create an open data platform and develop tools for end users and municipalities.

The project aims to create a bridge between infrastructural and digital innovation to offer reliable multimodal alternatives to car ownership. A digital and physical multimodal transport is the key to modal shift, accessibility and regain of street space in urban environments.

Mobihubs are designed without hierarchy between transport modes. Mobihubs offer appropriate transport mode for every journey: bicycle, collective transport, walking or shared mobility. Shared mobility is more than a first or last-mile solution. Car-sharing, bike-sharing or ride-sharing could be part of an intermodal journey, but they are mostly used as unique mode for one trip.

With every mobihub come a lot of data linked to transport behaviour, impact, and real time offers. The project will collect those data and will offer them on an open-data platform linked with www.mobipunt.be  / www.pointmob.be.

The project also aims to develop different digital tools making use of data:
- A mobihub management tool for municipalities to manage the mobihubs and monitor their impact
- A digital smartboard for users to have access to real time transport information about transport modes and other services integrated in the mobihub
- A user app to find hotspots at walkable and cyclable distance of the mobihub

More Lion will assist the project in inventorying and documenting useful data sources.