Using data as the key to a sustainable urban mobility transition

Mobility for people, cities, and the environment

With 4 billion people, around half of the world's population lives in urban areas and will travel almost 50 trillion kilometers in urban transport networks by 2050. A challenge for people, cities, and the environment. As the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, TUMI has set itself the goal of making mobility more sustainable. Under the focus of TUMI Data, the initiative looks at ways of making mobility data accessible and usable, thereby simplifying climate-friendly urban transport planning.

With the Mobility Data Hub and the GTFS Analyzer, TUMI has created two web applications that contribute to this vision. In the Mobility Data Hub, TUMI collects mobility data, primarily from South American and African cities, in order to make it available to researchers and decision-makers in urban and transportation planning. In the next step, the GTFS Analyzer serves as a tool for processing and visualizing GTFS data and makes initial analyses and findings particularly easy. We supported TUMI with conception, design, consulting, and development.

Mobility Data Hub: Open platform for mobility data

What should a platform look like that aims to improve the accessibility and distribution of global mobility data in order to provide local decision-makers with faster access to relevant data for transportation planning? We worked intensively on this question in collaboration with many other partner companies and developed the concept and design for the Mobility Data Hub. While the software implementation was carried out by our project partner Ondics, we also acted as technology consultants to ensure that the platform was not only technically mature but also user-friendly.

The Mobility Data Hub is an open platform for mobility-related data sets and is designed to be implemented in various cities with as little effort as possible. The Data Hub is now in use in several South American and African cities and, with over 1,000 data sets, serves as a central hub for data relating to mobility, the environment, and transport planning. The data sets can be found via the platform and downloaded for further use or accessed directly via the platform interface.

Visualizing mobility data with the GTFS Analyzer

With the development of the Mobility Data Hub came the desire for an ecosystem around the data platform that would not only make the data accessible, but also particularly easy to use. As a result, we developed the GTFS Analyzer – a web application that accesses the Data Hub and analyses and visualizes data sets in the standardized GTFS format (General Transit Feed Specification) in a simple way.

Users have the option of tailoring the analysis to their question and adapting both the temporal and geographical scope. In this way, initial insights can be quickly gained into network coverage, departure frequency, and service availability of mobility services in urban areas and used as a basis for further analysis. After all, a better understanding of existing mobility services can help make future planning more effective. In a world that is increasingly characterized by urban expansion, tools such as the Mobility Data Hub and the GTFS Analyzer offer cities and transport planners a decisive advantage in the sustainable planning of their mobility services.