The URBAN MOBILITY FORUM’s results

On November 30, URBAN MOBILITY FORUM, the main event in the field of smart urban mobility, took place at the Hyatt Regency Park Hotel. Organised by the working group of the National Technology Initiative "Autonet" together with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the Urban Mobility Forum brought together specialists from the automotive, transport and IT industries as well as the representatives of carriers and transport manufacturers, government agencies and industry experts.

The forum program included the speeches of the specialists from the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Rosstandart, Moscow Central Directorate for Central Computing, MosTransProject, Moscow, Yandex, VimpelCom, Volvo, Scania-Rus, Nissan, Tesla, Huawei, Here Technologies, Ministry of Energy, Moscow Region, NIIaT RVC, YouDrive, MADI, Frost & Sullivan, Arthur D.Little, Aurora Robotiks and other leading companies.

Among topics for discussion at the forum were solutions and innovations aimed at meeting the needs of citizens in mobility, comfort and safety of movement, original infrastructure developments targeted at improving the urban passenger traffic in modern cities, etc.

The event was launched with the demonstration of the prototype of the special sign "A" ("Autonomous driving") that will be used during the experiment started on public roads in Moscow and Tatarstan on the 1^st of December. This sign, fully compliant with the State Standart GOST, can be officially used on highly automated vehicles.

 

Urban Mobility Trends

In the framework of the plenary session “The Future of Urban Mobility. Price, speed, comfort: innovative possibilities of urban relocation” was presented the report of Alexander Gurko – the co-director of the working group on the NTI “Autonet” roadmap development and implementation, President of the NP GLONASS, member of the government commission on Russian economic modernisation and innovative development. The report’s subject is “Intellectual urban mobility. Market development of advanced services and services based on intelligent systems, platforms and networks in the logistics of people and things. Autonet.

Among the current urban mobility trends Alexander Gurko underlined the growth of the urban population and the associated increase in the load on the metropolis’s transport networks. So the insufficient density of roads is one of the problems Moscow is facing today is. The format of vehicle use is also changing: the need for real-time information about transport has come to the fore; for this reason, various applications providing data about the movements of all known transport modes in a particular city (Yandex Transport and others) are gaining popularity.

Tigran Parsadanyan, deputy director of the automotive industry and railway engineering department at the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia, emphasised that one of the main areas of automotive industry development is launching products with fundamentally new properties in the field of electric propulsion, autonomous driving, connected motor transport. It is also important to organise the after-sales service and to create the necessary engineering and transport infrastructure. 

Tigran Parsadanyan mentioned that since the 1^st of December an experimental operating of highly automated vehicles on public roads begins in Russia.

Alexey Kuleshov, deputy head of Rosstandart, in his report “The Future of Urban Mobility: Through Standards to Safety and Comfort”, spoke about the improvement of the transport systems’ efficiency and the innovations’ introduction by means of changes in the regulatory framework.

The algorithm for integrating the latter into the urban environment, as Alexey Kuleshov noted, includes five stages:

• development and approval of national standards (including the preliminary ones);

• using them through references in “transitional” regulatory legal acts (LA) for approbation;

• analysis of the application of new standards and, if necessary, their adjustment;

• promotion as a basis for UN GTRs and UN Regulations;

• use of references to GOST standards, UN GTRs and UN Regulations in national regulatory acts and technical regulations “On the safety of wheeled vehicles”.

 

Urban mobility through the mobile application

A whole series of speeches was devoted to this topic. For instance, the report “Mobility-as-a-Service: the future of urban mobility” presented Vadim Panarin, principal in the transport practice of the Moscow office of Arthur D. Little.

“What prevents cities of the rating’s middle part from rising becoming leaders? As the study shows, one of the main factors is the lack of coherence between individual elements of the transport system. The central element of the service that will help passengers easily change modes of transport while moving around the city is a centralized multimodal platform to which the largest possible number of transport infrastructure operators and supporting services in the city should be connected, where all data processed in real time are collected," said Vadim Panarin.

Pavel Kozlov, Business Development Director at HERE Technologies in Russia and the CIS, made another presentation on the topic of urban mobility. In his report he mentioned major trends in urban mobility, such as global automation, integration of artificial intelligence technologies and hypermobility.

“We see how technology is increasingly contributing to the development of physical and social mobility in the real and virtual world. The advanced functionality of machine vision and image processing on mobile devices continues to improve virtual interaction that seems almost real and meaningful connections,” said Pavel Kozlov.

In his opinion, in the future, autonomous vehicles can undermine many major sectors of the economy and affect the traditional vehicles use. Thus, in the USA and Germany, the use of personal non-automated cars will decrease from 30% to 8% and from 32% to 10%, respectively.

Tatyana Mikheeva, head of the research sector of organisational and methodological support for transport planning in the Research Institute of Automobile Transport (NIIAT), continued the topic of the main trends in urban mobility, identifying the key trends in passenger traffic - “digitalization of services”, “demand for low-cost airlines”, “transport integration and demand for quality”.

According to Tatyana Mikheeva, now in the structure of the urban mobility of Paris, 60% are occupied by public transport, 20% by car, 15% by walking, and only 5% by bicycles. In Berlin, all indicators (except for bike rides) are almost equal - this is 27-31%.

Trucks in the high-tech metropolis 

The trucks were not forgotten in the context of the innovative transport systems of the future.

“We are currently conducting research in such areas as autonomy, mobility, connectivity and mixed solutions”. This is how Yevgenia Arzhanova, director of GR in the Volvo Group, began her report “The Evolution of Urban Mobility”.

 “We believe that it is in the city that electric transport has the greatest prospects: reduced emissions and noise, energy efficiency. We started developing these technologies with buses, moving from electric hybrids to all-electric buses,” she said.

The report “Mobility of trucks in megalopolises” presented by Vakhtang Partzvaniya, director of Governmental Services in “Scania-Rus” company, was also devoted to the topic of freight transport.

“I’m talking rather not about large-scale machinery, for example, long-haul trucks, but about trucks that perform delivery operations: logistics and delivery of goods to retail, as well as communal and snow-removal equipment. Changes that occur in this segment of transport are quite significant. The main thing is that this type of transport is now on the threshold of completely new transformations, and their cause is a global challenge. Therefore, emphasis should be placed on the autonomy, mobility, connectivity and mixed solutions mentioned at the forum today. But we should add another method related to alternative fuels,” he said.

Digital amenities and the future of “Smart Cities”

Daria Raspopina, chief specialist of the Centre of road traffic organisation, in her speech told about how the Moscow balanced transport system is created in “My Street” program. The speaker guesses that the main goal of the program is to create a comfortable and safe transport and pedestrian structure.

It was told in the report what new mechanisms were used in the design of transport schemes (among them - the innovative “Complete streets” approach which allows designing the street from one facade to another as a solid object including stops, sidewalks, parking spaces and other elements) .

Denis Serechenko, Huawei Network Technologies director, dedicated his speech to the formation of “Smart Cities”, innovative territories in which the entire urban infrastructure is connected by sensors, networks, data centres, and the resulting information is collected in a single centre, categorized and then used to create applications. The latter should develop state institutions, make the city safer with their work and create the most comfortable environment for citizens.

At the end of the report, Denis Serchenko drew attention to the position of Huawei towards “smart cities”: the company builds a “nervous system” for such territories. In particular, it is engaged in the development of the Internet of Things, communication networks, cloud data centres and, as a result, the City Management Centre.

The evolution of the automotive industry and the eco-future with electric cars

Igor Antarov, managing partner of Moscow Tesla Club, drew the attention of the audience to the global automotive industry that has been changing rapidly over the last century, and noted that the transition to electric vehicles will occur faster than expected. The presentation contained some statistics reflecting a steady increase in sales of electric cars from 2010 to 2017 in Germany, Norway and China.

Igor Antarov stressed that at the moment the main factor stopping the user from buying an electric car is its high price. The latter is due to the expensive battery power, which is a third of the cost of the electric vehicle. However, as soon as the batteries’ prices go down, the demand for electric cars, according to the expert’s prediction, will increase.

The speaker underlighted that the transition to electric cars is not only the potential for the growth of autonomous transport, road safety and equalization of the load on the energy network, but also the conscious contribution of every inhabitant on the planet to the environmental safety.

The evolution of the automotive industry on the example of the global strategy of Nissan was shown in the report of Tatiana Gorovaya, GR director in Nissan Motor Corporation. In her presentation the expert clearly demonstrated the changes in Nissan car models since 1933. The speaker drew attention to the latest 2018 Nissan Leaf model, equipped with an electric motor. This electric car is the best selling in Europe during the first eight months of 2018.

Infrastructure for electric cars and inclusive transport services 

Leonid Neganov, the Moscow Region Minister of Energy, spoke about the implementation of the project of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles on the example of the Moscow Region.

According to the speaker, by 2019 the network of local charging stations should be significantly expanded. As part of cooperation with Mosenergosbyt, charging stations will have to be located in parking lots of shopping centers and urban public parking lots, as well as in places of cultural heritage. In addition, a network of charging stations integrated into the lighting poles will be created (there are already 200 objects). 

In his turn, Sultan Zhankaziev, head of the department “Organisation and Traffic Safety” of Moscow Automobile and Highway State Technical University (MADI), spoke about the services of promising transport systems. In his report the expert noted that the development of the latter has several objectives such as the organization and safety of traffic, the improvement of i-mobility including an increase in user services. Sultan Zhankaziev added that in the future they will be used for security and search services, emergency response services, insurance services, etc.