Birmingham will provide a testbed to analyse, design, develop and evaluate a use case related to management of mobility in the large metropolitan area with a specific focus on both motorised and non-motorised mobility. Motorised mobility will be monitored via large scale data from a wealth of sensors, citizen apps and The Floow data. Non-motorised mobility will be monitored by involving citizen associations such as runners and cyclists through the Be Active Birmingham initiative (beactivebirmingham.co.uk). Currently many people feel that in Birmingham they have no real alternative to driving their car, which results in over one million car trips each day by Birmingham residents – a quarter of which are less than a mile.
SETA in Birmingham
SETA will provide the understanding of existing mobility usage to support encouragement of behavioural change and make the modal shift. Encouraging more cycling will help to address a number of key challenges for the City Council. These are not limited to issues around accessibility, personal mobility and managing congestion, but also include supporting a more active and healthy population, improving air quality and reducing the associated health impacts and reducing the city’s carbon emissions. Using multiple data capture methods such as mobile applications that offer incentives (Reward Your World with Better Birmingham Points), GPS in free bikes, YourTel tracking of Active Parks participation as well as leisure card and Be Active participation in the city. We will develop methodologies to scrape published activity data from the web as well as seek ways to capture more informal activity such as dog-walking. Birmingham will use SETA to not only focus on mobility (and specifically on transport) in the inner city, they will also focus on the broader metropolitan area. Services provided will include:
Strategic planning of mobility in the wider region based on explicit or implicit needs of citizens and business;
Detailed long-term mobility planning including plans for resilience to climate change (strains) and natural and human made emergencies (shocks), as well as shorter term planning for large events (e.g. large city-wide events);
Decision support and scenario simulations for city councils and authorities to cope with everyday traffic situations, smaller events and emergencies;
Services to citizens and business, e.g. personal and organisational mobility planning support based on pervasive real time information as well as automatically gathered personal historical mobility information; this will include support for people’s mobility needs in terms of health improvement and transport needs.
Birmingham plans to involve thousands of citizens and businesses to test and use the SETA infrastructure as part of their decision making process.