Space for Twin Cities: Smart Mobility seminar

Nearly half of the world population nowadays lives in cities, with figures expected to grow in the next decades. Representatives from Tallinn in Estonia and Turin in Italy discussed how space technology can enable people and goods to move around in an efficient and environmentally friendly manner on December 15, 2020 in a seminar organised by ESA’s Downstream Gateway department.

The seminar was presented by Donatella Ponziani, Head of the Downstream Gateway Office at ESA, and moderated by Nick Appleyard, Head of Downstream Business Applications at ESA.

Fabrizio Arneodo, Chief Information and Technology Officer at T5 S.r.l. in Turin, illustrated the several services and technological aspects that the city of Turin as in place. In the last few years the city focused its efforts on C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems) services towards connected vehicles for info-mobility and safety purposes. They also implemented a Traffic Management Centre that distributes standard messages enabling C-ITS services.

Jaagup Ainsalu, Head of Smart Mobility projects at Transport Department of the Municipality of Tallinn, presented the several smart mobility projects in place across the city: priority lanes for buses, parking hubs to get free access to public transport, electric car short term rent system and self driving buses. A special project involves the use of artificial intelligence to calculate the movements of pedestrians, bicycles, buses and cars with the aid of cameras to best manage smart street lights.

Amanda Regan, Head of Φ-lab Invest Office and Investing in Industrial Innovation (InCubed) Programme Manager at ESA, showed the opportunities offered by the new technologies that can move “Earth Observation” (EO) towards the new paradigm of “Earth Intelligence” and how smart mobility can be part of this. She also presented the Φ-lab and InCubed activities aimed at supporting and developing the commercial sector based on EO products and services.

Javier Ventura Traveset, Head of Galileo Navigation Science Office at ESA, illustrated the technology, history and main figures of the Galileo programme and how it enables services related to smart mobility such as public transport optimisation, location based services, smart street lights, smart parking, geofencing, autonomous electric transportation, real time monitoring of noise and pollution, disaster and emergency tracking, advanced urban planning and city assets tracking.

Please find in the following table the presentations of the event.

You can watch here the full recording of the event.