Bucharest's Integrated Mobility Center

Challenge / Goal

Bucharest, the capital of Romania, has about 1.800.000 inhabitants and is located in the southern part of the country. The Intercommunity Development Association for Public Transport Bucharest-Ilfov (TPBI) has undertaken mobility planning at the urban and functional urban area level, coordinating the interests of many smaller peri-urban and rural municipalities as well as the capital city. TPBI is perceived as a pioneer of new solutions, ready to test and adopt any kind of innovation as soon as it evolves. Learning from other cities, participating in research and innovation projects, and external consultancies are channels through which innovation is fed into decision making processes or operational activities. However, not yet fully developed governance structures and frameworks TPBI faces with some major challenges:

• Various Information Technology System (ITS) applications are deployed in an uncoordinated way in the urban areas covered by TPBI, leading to low efficiency of system deployment and low interoperability between the public transport systems. 
• Processes at TPBI level and in relation to operators are currently not sufficiently digitized to create an integrated flow of data and adequate decision support for real-time public transport management.
  for real-time public transport management. 
• Existing equipment and operating technologies of the public transport system (both at the TPBI and operator level) fail to provide the basic facilities for efficient public transport management and effective management of commercial costs and revenues.

Within FastTrack the main goal of the mobility innovation selected by TPBI is to create an Integrated Mobility Center. This centre would ensure the electronic collection of public transport and mobility data from all sources and IT systems in order to obtain coherent, complete, and integrated information to assist decisionmaking for optimising public transport and for making investments, including monitoring the SUMP. Two Modules compose the Integrated Mobility Center:

Module 1 – The planning software is the IT support necessary to develop and update the Integrated Transport Program for the Bucharest-Ilfov region. It configures lines, respectively routes intended for public transport in the Bucharest-Ilfov region and it establishes specific traffic schedules. It can integrate data from the monitoring application on average journey times recorded at interchanges and communicate data to the planning application on public transport routes/lines and traffic schedules implemented across the network.

Module 2 – The monitoring software is the IT support for monitoring the circulation of public transport on routes in relation to the transport program of the operators based on the management delegation contracts/service provision contracts. It will be able to integrate the data related to the planned transport performance (the timetables of the public transport lines) and retrieve data (GPS coordinates, speed, route, vehicle identification elements on the route, etc.) from the systems in which they are collected at the operator level.