The next poster cities for mobility

If you rode the subway in New York in 1910, you needed to purchase a paper ticket for .05 cents from a ticket booth, which would then be verified by an attendant before they could enter. By 1921, New York stopped using paper tickets and instead allowed riders to drop a single nickel straight into electric turnstiles and enter.

The fare switched to .15 cents in 1953 and, because there is no .15 cent coin, riders purchased magnetised tokens they could use in place of coins at the turnstiles. Although prices changed over time, these tokens were used for the rest of the century and the subway only stopped accepting them in 2003, nine years after the arrival of the MetroCard.

Today, picturing subway riders in New York trying to find change or filling their pockets with tokens is almost unimaginable. Even the once innovative MetroCard has nearly been phased out, making way for an effortless type of ticketing.

Residents and visitors have long been able to move throughout the city with less friction by simply tapping their digital wallet or contactless card to ride – making New York one of the first poster cities for simplified transport ticketing. Yet, this didn’t happen overnight, and it required multiple iterations and improvements for New York to build its reputation as a leader in mobility innovation.

Cities positioning themselves to become poster cities for mobility

While not an extensive list, here are some of the cities working to position themselves, or maintain their positions as poster cities for mobility.

Edinburgh, Scotland: Lothian Buses, the UK’s largest municipal bus company, which serves Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, launched open loop payments in 2019. Now, the volume of contactless EMV transactions is nearing 60% of all “paid-for journeys.” Soon, the account-based ticketing scheme with open payments, launched in partnership with Flowbird, will be extended across Edinburgh Trams, to create a seamless, multimodal travel experience in the city.

Madrid, Spain, Europe: In January of 2023, Madrid turned off its last diesel-powered bus as the city moved to a fleet composed solely of compressed natural gas, electric and hydrogen buses.

Shanghai, China: Moving people is a big endeavour. In Shanghai, their public transportation line moves more than two billion people every year – equivalent to moving their overall populations of 26.32 million over 7,000 times.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States: One of the United State’s first integrated Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) projects, Pittsburgh has set out to help its citizens that are transportation insecure by connecting traditional, emerging low-cost, and shared transportation options into a single, easy to use system.

Tokyo, Japan: Tokyo is home to the world’s most extensive urban rail network and moves 3.5 billion passengers a year, with famously on-time departures. It’s also on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030.

Helsinki, Finland: Even with a small city population of 600,000, Helsinki travellers are able to make multi-modal trips, including buses, short taxis, shared bike trips, and discounted rental cars. Private cars account for only 21% of Helsinki’s traffic.

Berlin, Germany: In multiple locations in Berlin, mobility experts have created “Jelbi stations” which includes cars, bike sharing, on-demand shuttles, scooters, and e-bikes.

Monaco: Working with Flowbird to leverage MaaS, Monaco has connected their cultural events to their transportation. Citizens and tourists receive 20% off for their first events from the app. Then, the app sends them a notification about the best ways to get to their event, including public transportation, to help them plan their route.

Perth, Australia: Prioritising safety, security, efficiency, economy and customer service, the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia teamed-up with Flowbird to launch the first and most advanced mass transit smartcard system in the country. The system resulted in a 97% increase in card use and a 16% uplift in public transit revenue. The next step, coming soon, will be an open payment system.

Characteristics of a poster city for mobility

From frictionless payments to the use of real-time, multi-channel data, the poster cities of the future have a lot in common. While not all of the following apply to every poster city currently, they likely have a plan to implement each of these systems in the future. If you want to put your city on the map as a great city to travel in, here’s what you need to know.

1. They leverage MaaS to create the greatest impact

Drivers and riders want to be able to plan, book and pay for mobility services in one place. MaaS connects a city’s mobility services to create a frictionless experience no matter how someone is travelling. It enables travellers to:

Find and pay for parking, or parking and charging.
Book tickets to events and plan their route to get there
Extend parking sessions if needed from their phone
Receive perks and discounted rates for taking public transportation
Book bikes, scooters, and ride sharing vehicles ahead of time

2. They manage the curbside experience, from e-parking to payments

As the volume of deliveries has rocketed in recent years, waiting times for parking spaces have become longer and longer. Drivers spend somewhere between 17 to 91 hours a year looking for parking in the United States and Europe – and no one enjoys a single minute of it! In addition to the frustration of wasting time, cruising for a parking space racks up cost from wasted fuel, elevates carbon emissions, and exacerbates congestion.

Managing the curbside effectively, and creating a seamless experience for all mobility modes who need to access it, sets a city apart as a poster city for mobility. The ideal is that drivers can easily navigate to an available parking space or park and charge station, and can choose to pay using a terminal or an app, like Flowbird’s parking app, with the payment method of their choice.

To enable this, Flowbird has created integrated solutions for cities. Our Flowbird HUB platform, for example, is connected to all our sales channels, and the flow of real-time data back and forth informs cities’ strategy on how to optimise the curbside. It’s easy to roll out tariffs and rules across the terminal estate. Cities can also communicate with end users via our parking app, keeping them informed with the latest information about free parking spaces so they can navigate quickly to a convenient location.

3. They make it easy to choose more sustainable forms of travel

If someone doesn’t know a type of travel exists as an option to get them to their destination, they can’t pick it. And if they have a frustrating or cumbersome experience trying to take an alternative form of transportation – buses, scooters, bikes, rideshares, etc – they likely won’t take it again.

Through technology such as MaaS apps, local authority travel portals and multi-functional mobility kiosks, poster cities can create awareness of all travel options, allowing commuters to plan, book and pay for multi-modal journeys through one user interface.

In the not too distant future, they may also be able to incentivise better travel choices by serving useful, personalised data about users’ travel behaviour. For instance, a MaaS app or travel portal may be able to provide a user dashboard that identifies the impact of each of their mobility choices on cost, carbon emissions and health. Users would be able to see in granular detail how simple swaps could make a big difference.

In one dashboard, riders and drivers could one day get answers to these questions. Once someone chooses a specific type of transportation, the app makes it easy to get to where they need to go, featuring tap-and-go technology.

4. Poster cities do more by unifying mobility ecosystems

When a city has 10 customer service providers, 6 hardware providers, and 4 energy providers, it’s hard to get meaningful data across all stakeholders. Without meaningful data, it’s hard to make changes or improve the user experience.

Poster cities use centralised mobility hubs to get the data they need to create a great user experience. Real-time data enables fare adjustment, encourages sustainable transportation, mitigates congestion, and improves the way people move.

For instance, at Flowbird we help put intelligence into mobility policies with two data hubs, one focusing on parking management and one transport management:

Flowbird HUB – A parking and e-mobility management suite to help manage the curbside, improve traffic flow, and incentivize the use of electric vehicles.
Flowbird CloudFare – A transport ticketing system management suite to inform estate management, fares and topology, account-based ticketing, so you can optimise infrastructure and incentivise ridership.
Flowbird MaaS – Cross insight between mobility services eco system to understand how the city is used.

The road to becoming a poster city for mobility

Creating an exceptional travel experience isn’t about rolling out everything at once, it’s about prioritising what will have the biggest impact on the city, with the highest adoption rate, and building upon its success.

Becoming a poster city is a long game, and it’s important to have a future vision, and a willingness to get there over multiple years. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither was its mobility infrastructure.

Becoming a poster city is within your reach

Every city has its own context, issues, and mindset. There’s no out-of-the-box solution that will make a city a poster city for transportation. Digitising the life of a citizen is unique, because the citizens themselves are unique in every city. Yet, you can tag along when it comes to creating transportation solutions for your city.

Flowbird is an expert at mobility strategy and execution, and has worked with cities around the world to create a better mobility experience. Leverage our experts, and our learnings from the cities we’ve worked in, to come up with solutions that improve the lives of your citizens.

Get in touch to learn more about how to make your city a poster city for transportation. Or check out our article on what politicians and policymakers need to know about MaaS.