InTraffic provides municipalities with control of mobility data

Tessa Matser, business consultant at InTraffic, says that in itself there is nothing wrong with individual data. The problem lies in the fact that a lack of coherence between the available information means that municipalities and provinces do not have sufficient control to be able to tackle current challenges. After all, mobility is an issue that does not stand alone. Instead, it is intrinsically related to issues such as local economic growth, safety, quality of life and environmental objectives. Matser: "What municipalities and provinces increasingly need is control of mobility issues as part of their own policy. To properly monitor and manage numerous current challenges, coherent information is needed in order to make policy issues transparent."

"The data approach allows us to provide the right information in order to make problems transparent and concrete."

A good example is given by colleague Martijn van Aartrijk, senior business consultant at InTraffic. In Utrecht, a vision of the future is unfolding under the name 10-minute-city. In 2040, things that you need every day or frequently must be located at a distance of approximately 10 minutes from where you live or work. In that scenario, travelling by public transport, riding your bicycle or walking will quickly take you to where you need to be. InTraffic supports this policy by means of its Multimodal Analytics (M2A) platform.

You can think of the platform as an application for importing, validating, analysing and processing historical and real-time data into decision information. "The platform makes individual data readily available in order to provide numerical support for policy issues. To use real-time data alongside historical data, InTraffic has entered into partnership with KPN. "This allows us to import 2 billion messages a day, and this provides users with real-time insight into mobility issues in their own environment."

The Utrecht municipality uses the platform to assess mobility issues in context. "Work is done from the individual modes of transport, such as bicycle, car or pedestrian. What the Utrecht municipality is doing with the platform is interconnecting the separate modalities. This coherence lends itself well to management based on policy issues."

What is striking about this implementation in Utrecht is that the choice was made for a design thinking approach. Van Aartrijk believes that this in itself is logical. Without defining beforehand exactly how the final goal should be shaped, the ideal solution was sought during the development process. "There are a lot of people at management level who know a lot about mobility issues. What’s more, there are experts who understand data. However, what often happens is that these people don’t understand each other optimally. This is precisely where the M2A platform and the design thinking approach can add value. Using the data approach, we can provide the right information to make problems transparent and concrete. And that, in turn, can serve as part of the policy to achieve the desired effect."

The platform offered by InTraffic is particularly suitable for decision-makers with mobility in their portfolio. In addition, the tool can also prove useful for commercial parties operating at locations with a large number of transport movements, such as an airport. Van Aartrijk: "We are not a traditional mobility consultancy firm that writes policy itself, and we don’t assume the role of the client. What we do, however, is to substantiate, measure and evaluate the policy using data. This happens beforehand and during implementation. Moreover, our added value also lies in the long-term experience we have with the mobility domain."