Expert roundtable on Smart Urban Mobility – Infrastructure and Business Innovation

After a long restriction to digital formats, Hannover Messe 2022 opened up new opportunities for intensive exchange and networking. BMDV's Digital Dialogues invited its stakeholders to discuss smart urban mobility in the trade fair's Convention Center on 1 June.

The participants represented research institutes, industry associations and enterprises from the Digital Dialogues' partner countries. Dr Lisa Günther from BMDV opened the roundtable. This was followed by a lively discussion on opportunities and challenges in the development of future mobility scenarios. Who should be in the driver's seat of developing frameworks for smart urban mobility? How to handle data sharing and data governance? What role does international cooperation play?

Public-private partnerships and the role of regulation

The experts agreed that the complex topic of smart urban mobility calls for a strong cooperation of research, industry and politics. Public-private partnerships can form a building block to connect different stakeholders and are important to both advance and regulate smart mobility. As decisions about mobility are currently often private decisions, there should be incentives and frameworks for the collaboration of the public and private sector.

Governmental regulation was a key point of discussion. The participants shared their different perspectives: On the one hand, to develop human-centred mobility solutions that contribute to sustainability and a good user-experience alike, regulation and facilitation is crucial to set the right incentives through regulation and facilitation. Governmental regulation can set a clear direction and prevent negative effects, like market oversaturation. On the other hand, it can also create bottlenecks in fast-paced markets.

Another topic of the roundtable was the use of data in smart urban mobility. As data is fundamental to efficient, sustainable and inclusive mobility, the experts believe it is important to promote data sharing. Internationally harmonised standards can provide the necessary trust and confidence to share mobility data.

International cooperation is key: Next steps for the Digital Dialogues

In the discussion, it was highlighted how essential international exchange is. Sharing best practices and experiences with stakeholders from other sectors and countries helps to find solutions to common challenges. The participants stressed that in such a dynamic field, it is important to establish a constructive culture of error tolerance and to learn from experiences on a global level. In this regard, the roundtable was already a good opportunity for international exchange.

In addition to the cross-border exchange of experiences, the aim of the event was to identify next steps for the Digital Dialogues. As a concrete next measure, the topic of smart urban mobility will be picked up again during the Digital Dialogues' annual stakeholder consultation in autumn. Further, it is planned to engage with the stakeholders again to identify possible cooperation projects.