On Wednesday 6 November MaaS Alliance together with ERTICO organised the thematic breakfast meeting “Making mobility smarter” at the European Parliament. The breakfast meeting brought together MEPs, parliamentary assistants, experts from the various committees of the Parliament and the representatives of the European Commission. The meeting was hosted by MEP Henna Virkkunen, member of ITRE and TRAN Committees. During the morning ACEA, Rijkswaterstaat, MaaS Global and Europcar Mobility Group gave presentations highlighting state-of-the-art intelligent transport and green mobility solutions. The discussion touched on how to best deploy the latest technologies and support the roll-out of sustainable mobility solutions and the competitiveness of European industries.
MEP Virkkunen, in her welcoming words, said that there is a pressing need to make transport cleaner, sustainable, safer, smarter, multimodal, inclusive and more efficient. The future of mobility offers many possibilities to reduce emissions and congestion as well as increase safety and consumer choice in the sector but she also mentioned interoperability and data security as the urgent challenges which need to be addressed by the industry and regulators.
Jacob Bangsgaard, ERTICO CEO presented ERTICO’s brand new Insight paper on ITS, with 6 pillars and explained how ERTICO through its wide partnership can support local, national, European regulators and the industries in digital transformation. Piia Karjalainen in her presentation explained the importance and advantages of MaaS in European transport policy and explained how MaaS can be the solution to deliver the multimodal integrated ticketing, which has been highly anticipated by the European policymakers.
Further presentations were given by Eric-Mark Huitema from ACEA, Ronald Adams from Rijkswaterstaat, Krista Huhtala-Jenks from MaaS Global and Jehan de The from Europcar Mobility Group. Claire Depre, Head of Unit for Sustainable and Intelligent Transport at DG MOVE, concluded the discussion by explaining the topical considerations of the European Commission. Active discussion widely touched the questions on access to data and data sharing environments, passenger and consumer rights schemes in mobility and the C-ITS developments.
Presentations are available for download below:
