Integrated mobility data plaform for regions: the hot topic

A trend toward the deployment of regional mobility platforms

© enRoute (CC-BY-SA)

Many regions are looking into leveraging regional mobility platforms to support more open competition between public transport operators and to get the entire control over some of their strategic missions. These missions are built based on four main pillars:

• Passenger information (CAD/AVL, schedule and real-time data repositories including fares and disruptions, route calculators, mobile apps, websites, etc.),
• Customer relations (marketing, customer relations center, ticket offices, after-sales services, etc.),
• Ticketing and/or open payment (validators, ticketing cards, dematerialised tickets, paper tickets, sales and usage databases, etc.),
• Ticket distribution (sales management, user database, ticket machines, direct or third-party remote sales, fare database, etc.).

Multimodal mobility data: the link between the different components of a regional platform

Multimodal mobility data describing public transport services (schedule data and real-time data, including disruption data and fare data) are at the heart of regional mobility platforms. They are the source of multimodal information disseminated to all passengers. It also forms the basis for coordinating transport services, fare management, and ticket distribution policy.

The multimodal mobility data collected, validated, enriched, and aggregated directly feeds the various systems of the regional platform in the appropriate data standards, such as:

• The regional trip planners feeding the regional mobile app and website,
• The regional ticketing system(s),
• The regional data warehouse,
• Regional Open Data Portal,
• Data analysis tools,
• The feedback loop to the CAD/AVL systems or school transport management tools, etc.

A moderate cost

As for budget, the cost of managing multimodal mobility data is relatively small. Let’s take the example of a regional platform with an annual operating cost of €20 million (an amount that can be observed in tenders that have already been awarded). The annual cost of managing data repositories represents only 0,5% to 2% of this amount. Thus, the budgetary weight of mobility data management does not reflect its strategic nature.

The Regions and integration teams are best placed to manage data services

Each stakeholder involved in a regional platform tends to prepare and integrate mobility data for their own use, without necessarily taking into account the constraints of other stakeholders upstream or downstream in the process: the ticketing system only understands data containing certain identifiers, the trip planner favours a semi-proprietary format, the marketing team needs data covering a period of six months, etc. The Region, which is leading the project, generally relying on an integrator to handle the technical aspects of the integration, must ensure that the interfaces between the different systems function correctly.

The Region teams can fulfill their role as orchestrators of Regional mobility services by:

• Maintaining direct control over the mobility data and therefore over the passenger information and distribution channels,
• Relying on standardised multimodal mobility data formats (GTFS/GTFS-RT and NeTEx/SIRI) and flexible technical architectures,
• Prioritising the use of solutions with a user interface for simplified handling by regional teams and data producers,
• Providing all their data producers with powerful tools that enable the alignment between objectives and procedures.

Chouette SaaS and Ara SaaS are proven solutions listed on the CATP and UGAP. Many regions use them on a daily basis to achieve their operational and financial objectives in ambitious and complex projects.