1. 20th European Conference on Mobility Management – ECOMM 2016
POSTER TITLE: Using social media to involve the citizens of Thessaloniki in Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning
AUTHORS: Glykeria Myrovali, Katerina Chrysostomou, Maria Morfoulaki, Kornilia Maria Kotoula & Georgia Aifadopoulou
CERTH/HIT
Hellenic Institute of Transport / Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH)
Respecting travellers’ needs
Mode choice depends on citizens’ daily transportation needs as well as on travellers’ perception that is formed based on qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the transportation network; public transport services, frequencies, coverage level, door-to-door services, information provision, cycling and walking infrastructures, parking management are only some of the main factors influencing mode choice.
The ability of a local authority to plan and implement effective measures to be taken in order to minimize the use of private car depends on the understanding of citizens habits and needs. The need of having a clear view of city’s transport network daily operation motivates many Municipalities to install ITS equipment for real time data collection. The combination of such existing technologies with a deeper knowledge of users’ perception and needs can become a very useful guide on the hands of local authorities serving their agenda for a sustainable and environmental friendly city.
As a result, a number of modern cities have started realizing the benefits of exploiting social media (such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) in order to reach out to people, connect with them and open a constant online constructive dialogue taking advantage of these inexpensive and widely accessible tools.
Crowdsourcing in SUMP development; a real innovation
A mobile application will be developed by CERTH-HIT offering crowdsourcing services for collecting daily trip diaries as well as gathering anonymous information by the citizens for the road traffic condition and travellers’ needs. The analysis of the data to be collected is estimated to provide guidance for the necessary interventions to be proposed within Thessaloniki’s SUMP that is currently under development.
CERTH aims to involve the city of Thessaloniki in a procedure to put into practice, test and evaluate the advantages of such a system. The estimation of OD matrices deriving from the data provided by the citizens is considered as a very cost-efficient alternative to the classic survey method. The collected OD data along with the proposals made by the registered to the application users (opinions, insights and suggestion from the passengers perceptive on how to improve the traffic conditions in the city), will reveal the success path for Public Transport interventions or other new to some degree concepts (e.g. timebanking proposals) based on the real needs of the citizens.
In order to make crowdsourcing techniques more attractive to the user, a back – end rewarding perspective will be deployed; each trip added in the system will give one credit for the user and after collecting a specific number of credits, the user will be rewarded with discount or free access in events or public transport means. In order to boost the use of the application, the city of Thessaloniki will have to start its promotion campaign with developing the “city’s employees network” which will be the first users of the application providing them with motivations among which access to technical seminars and capacity building training activities (actions to be realized in the framework of the current project) apart from giving them the opportunity to feel part of an “innovative” for the Greek context transport-related crowdsourcing community.
The project will be based on a series of dissemination and awareness raising activities, both for familiarizing the citizens with the crowdsourcing application and informing them for the benefits (at personal and at community level) and for making also other competent authorities aware of the advantages and the opportunities arising from the outsourcing of ideas oriented towards air quality improvement to the wider public.
Thessaloniki’s case; the existing “mobility management” smart background (tools, infrastructure)
The Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT) developed and maintains a detailed traffic model (a 4-step model) for the wider Metropolitan Area of Thessaloniki, Greece. The simulated network consists of nodes and intersections that cover Thessaloniki’s Prefecture and part of neighboring Prefectures (from which 439 are signalised intersections) and road segments (links).
This tool, fed with data collected via different sources, is used for evaluating proposed mobility solutions and interventions.
In the framework of previous ITS-related actions and projects (Thessaloniki Ring Road Traveller Information System, Mobithess: Thessaloniki's Intelligent Urban Mobility Management System and EasyTrip: GR-BG E-mobility solutions, SEE-ITS), ITS infrastructure have
already been installed in Thessaloniki and ITS services and applications regarding information provision have been deployed;
263 Inductive loops
33 detectors in the city center and 9 in the Inner Ring Road (camera / radar)
43 bluetooth
Floating car data from 1200 taxi (GPS)