Improving mobility and modal shift through information and communication
Issy-les-Moulineaux is one of the municipalities of Greater Paris, located in the southwest of the urban agglomeration. Due to its location and economic vitality, this area of the Paris Region faces substantial traffic volumes because many people from the whole Paris area transit to or through Issy for work by car.
Therefore whilst only 27% of Issy’s citizens declare they use the car to go to work, data shows congestion is actually a far bigger problem caused by people reaching or passing through/by Issy for professional reasons.
This leads to two different problems impacting society: (1) Huge traffic congestion due to exceptional situations (i.e. international summits requesting road closures, strikes of public transport); (2) Non-resident people wanting to use their own cars, putting pressure on infrastructure (parking, roads etc.) and increasing pollution.
Therefore the city requires new means to effectively communicate with citizens and organisations in order to change their commuting behaviour.
In the short term it is necessary to respond to any unforeseen situations and communicate with the public to change their immediate behaviour. For the longer term, Issy wants to realise a substantial and lasting change in behaviour and driving a modal shift away from cars towards “greener” alternatives which will reduce road traffic and relieve the road infrastructure.
To this end, Issy is launching a pilot with a start-up called MyAnatol and working on an app that uses Google and Tomtom traffic data for a double purpose:
- Real-time information for the user (traffic, bike sharing availability and public transports disturbances)
- Control dashboard with a tracker (i.e. data collection on a specific period and route / perimeter) for municipal services
The goal of this experimental step is to be able to use this tool to:
- Allow citizens to have information independently
- Allow the communications service to use the data to inform citizens of any emergencies (traffic)
Challenges encountered:
The biggest challenge Issy faces in using data for policy making is related to the collection of data as it is mainly held by service providers, both public and private. This is further complicated because not every provider actually owns the data created by their services.
Moreover, data is often not compliant with standards. As it comes from different services, compromises have to be made in making data visualisations useful enough to actually extract valuable comparisons between the various services and create useful insights to evaluate existing policies and services.
Finally, the COVID period didn’t allow to complete the street marketing as planned, consequently the planning was delayed and this pilot will be completed in september 2020.
Stakeholders:
- Issy Média, leader and coordinator of the project
- City of Issy-les-Moulineaux, policy maker
- Grand Paris Seine Ouest Urban Agglomeration, policy maker
- MyAnatol, data and tools provider
Actions steps:
This pilot is related to the use of an application that proposes the anonymized data of users, mainly collected from various users and providers.
The most important point is related to the double functionality that can be precious:
- An app in real time for indirect users of data, i.e. citizens, that need quick and reliable information;
- A control room for city departments (and any other public authority) to have knowledge of what is happening (or what happened), also on roads that are not directly under its control. This can have the effect also to improve the collaboration between stakeholders.
Moreover, the application allows also to add messages to users from the City with a potential tremendous impact on the communication through users.
The project has mainly 3 phases:
- Study of current data to define the perimeter
- Launch of a street marketing operation
- Evaluation to define the success of this kind of operation to understand how effective this will be from a citizens and city communication’s point of view.
Lessons learned:
At this stage it is still early to identify lessons learnt.
Outcome impact:
Work in progress