Carmen Adamescu, EY Romania: The key of city transportation planning in Bucharest might be a telephone

According to a study conducted by EY, due to the city transformation towards busier and busier transportation services and traffic and population accumulation, now it is a perfect time to reconsider and reform the correspondent public policies in transportation.

2016-09-28 17:15:33

Traffic jams and underutilized transport systems stand for real challenges that policy makers should confront: putting the user at the center solution, according to a release of EY, summarizing the report called: All change, please: How shifting passenger behavior can improve mobility in cities.
According to this report, the future city traveler has several features, such as: interconnected, expects a perfect integration of transportation means, has a flexible work program and a peak hour, considers traveling by bike and walking as viable options and has a personal vision on mobility. Also, the modern city traveler is always connected through its smartphone, uses social media on daily bases and appreciates the connectivity to different information sources and transport options. According to EY study, the transport applications on smartphones were used by over 70 per cent of London inhabitants, while in Sydney, over 40 million traveling information interrogations registered on mobile devices have been registered.

According to Carmen Adamescu, Partner of business consultancy department at EY, Also the people in Bucharest are using their smart phones applications to access a transportation vehicle available, use alternative services such as Ube for taxi, Waze to optimize their route or they are members of a car pooling group on Facebook. The strong influence of digitalization in daily lives is a constant. "The public authorities could capitalize more on the technology advantages in order to either ease the traffic by early estimations of traffic jams and offering alternative solutions, to plan the public transportation and to offer the city inhabitants real time information about different mobility options."

Also, the manager underlines the obvious necessity to correlate all the factors and stakeholders involved in the transportation, from citizens to public authorities and suppliers of transportation services and equipment. "The city transport policies should be viewed in relation with the national transportation policy, to ensure coordinated planning and implementation of digital solutions that go beyond the boundaries of cities. In other words, it is not enough to have just smart cities, but cities connected by ensuring interoperability between urban systems and long distance, thereby improving traffic management, mobility, processes travel planning and cooperation among stakeholders at national and local level," according to Paul Ilau, manager EY Romania.

In 2014, Bucharest ranked as one of the busiest cities in Europe, with 41 per cent traffic congestion traffic rate, following a study conducted by EBRD and Romanian Government. Bucharest city hall plans to create 20.5 km of street routes dedicated exclusively to buses, in Northern, Western and Center of Bucharest.