City Mobility Services for Passengers through Innovative Real-time Demand Aggregation (CitySPIRE)

The peak and trough mobility demand profiles remain a critical challenge for city transport, and lead to negative consequences for welfare, productivity, energy use, and environment. This results from the largely fixed transport infrastructure with finite capacity that cannot respond dynamically to demand variations. Previous attempts to influence demand by altering travel behaviours through top-down policies failed to achieve meaningful improvements. CitySPIRE will address this challenge by creating a demand aggregation service presenting groups of passengers to transport operators. This will be achieved by combining location-based data from two communications (Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi) network operators. These data will create context-aware knowledge enabling demand-responsive transport services. The project output will be a new demand-responsive transport service curated by Simply Connect, enabled by a networked approach to demand aggregation and end user engagement. Underpinning this, a new commercial model for private data exchange and analytics will be tested. The consortium expects tools and insights from the project to increase the value of the existing Proxama, Purple, Cisco, and Movement Strategies propositions.