TRANSPORT Smart Class, North of England 2019

“Using Smart Roads to Keep Leeds Moving” – In this opening keynote presentation, Stephen will provide an introduction to Leeds City Council’s smart cities programme, Smart Leeds which includes the three priority areas of health, housing and transport. As the largest city in Western Europe without a mass transit system and with just one central railway station, commuters still rely heavily on buses and cars to get around, and like many major cities, Leeds is experiencing increasing problems with congestion and pollution. Joel will outline what Leeds City Council is doing to address these issues by using new technology in areas such as the city’s new Clean Air Zone and how it is involved in a new regional UTMC programme to improve traffic flows across West Yorkshire.

“AI for Accessibility” – The crest of the Tech4Good wave in the UK crashed on to the beach of last week’s London Tech Week, valued at £2.3 billion in 2018 with a turnover of £732million. Technology is merely a tool that will increasingly be used to tackle the most meaningful problems in our society. In this presentation, CityMaaS’ Co-founder and CEO will explain how combining this with user-centric design is key to successful products that can create positive social impact such as accessible travel – one of the major obstacles to independent lives. To tackle both online and real world location accessibility, we need to create a community that can help each other to overcome daily obstacles. CityMaaS is one of the UK’s leading start-ups in this ecosystem with the vision to provide personalised digital and travel experience using AI and crowd-sourced data.

“Journey Time Monitoring is Evolving – Find out how!” – Knowing what is happening on the road network, both locally and nationally, at any given moment is a constant challenge, as is understanding peak traffic flow or the performance of congestion reducing schemes. However, innovative changes to the way we can gather road user data for journey time monitoring mean road operators can now monitor their network quickly and economically. This presentation from Clearview Intelligence, including case studies, will show how crowdsourced data is changing the way in which we monitor our roads, empowering road operators to manage live situations and improve the experience for road users.

“How to Effectively Manage and Enforce Clean Air and Low Emission Zones with Virtual Permits and Digital ANPR” – A recent UN pollution report found that air in 44 UK cities and towns is too dangerous to breathe and estimated over 40,000 premature deaths per year from road polluted air. Imperial and Videalert demonstrate that the move towards managing air quality needn’t be a giant leap into the unknown and can be achieved by simply utilising proven technologies in a way that will make a very real difference to the quality of life in our cities and towns.

“Improving Traffic Insights with Artificial Intelligence” – Artificial Intelligence has brought about a revolution in mobility for the consumer, with new apps and services flooding the market, but is the infrastructure on which these all depend really keeping up? In this presentation, Peter will highlight two AI products and some cutting edge research that Vivacity are carrying out to make our roads smarter to ensure our road authorities can keep pace with the technical revolution. He will also explain how Vivacity’s video based sensor is able to provide a wide range of data outputs, from traditional classified counts and journey times, though to zonal occupancy, turning counts and detailed path analysis, and how many of these outputs can be added as an upgrade to existing traffic CCTV.

“Developing an Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Network” – As new plug-in vehicle electric sales continue to climb and the 2nd hard market for EVs begins to stabilise, alongside an increasing choice of plug-in vehicles with discounted and/or attractive leasing options and an expected price parity with ICE in the next few years, there is a pressing need to ensure that suitable charging infrastructure is provided to meet expected increasing demand. Key to this is ensuring that the right locations and technology are selected, that the supply of infrastructure is carefully managed (from a cost management perspective) and that scalability and flexibility can be accommodated to support the EV market. This keynote presentation will describe TfGMs approach to developing a regional charging infrastructure, providing insight and lessons learnt when moving from a first generation system to a modernised network, and how the tenets of innovation and future-proofing are essential when planning and delivering a charging network.

“Improving the Public Transport Customer Proposition with Smarter Data” – Last year, DfTs Bus Open Data programme consulted on its proposal to make the provision of bus fare data in an open way compulsory. While the industry eagerly awaits the outcome of that, TfN, as this closing keynote will show, are already cracking on with their plans to revolutionise the provision of fares information in the North of England. TfN hopes to set the industry standard and are actually developing a Fares Data Build Tool in partnership with both the DfT and Traveline. It will be delivered first in the North, with potential to scale it nationally. Importantly, TfNs scope is more than just bus. Fares data needs to be simple and transparent across all modes of public transport – tram, light rail, ferry and bus. TfN’s proposed tool will standardise all public transport data into the NeTEx format – the European technical standard for exchanging public transport information. The tool will then work in tandem with TfN’s Open Data Hub to make the information deliverable to passengers. In layman’s terms, this will help make multi-operator fares information more easily shareable, accessible and understandable for passengers in the North.