Micromobility to Enterprises, People, Industry and Cities: from concept to implementation.

The research and deployment of innovative technology in transport, as well as data availability to enable better services to citizens, are a crucial part of the Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy established by the European Commission (European Commission, 2020). Therefore, the main objective of the M2EPIC project is to define and analyze how big data from micromobility can provide tools to better plan safe micromobility services that promote the well-being of the population, and how different sensors (e.g., noise and particulate sensors) can act as enablers of the possibility of choosing cleaner routes by riders, as well as allow traffic management by cities to decrease pollution in certain routes. For this, as a secondary objective, M2EPIC will gather big data generated from micro vehicles to determine how these vehicles interact with the built environment and traffic. Data will be collected to detect the main routes where trips take place, main origin and destinations, acceleration, and speed to determine whether accidents happen and where they are located, so heat maps of dangerous routes can be created to enable riders to choose whether they want to take that route or not. In addition, citizens will be surveyed on the main attributes they need in sensored micromobility to increase ridership and the safety of this non-pollutant mode of transport. This information will allow enterprises and the industry to assess their technology capabilities for meeting riders’ needs to allow cities better regulation. The M2EPIC project aims to the provision of people-centered micromobility based on big data observation, as well as the choice of riders, and the exploration of the capabilities of the industry. Therefore, three stakeholders of the provision of shared micromobility in cities are included in the project, which are cities (for regulation), enterprises, and industries (that create and adapt vehicles), as well as people (final users of micromobility). The scientific research including this trinity of stakeholders allows the addressing of crucial issues related to micromobility provision in cities that culminated in the ban of shared e-scooters in Paris and the reduction in the provision of micro vehicles in certain cities across Europe, which is the safety concerns from both users and cities that regulate the service. The presence of the industry and enterprises allows for better development of micro vehicles that enable data collection on different important matters to feed dashboards for policymakers. Using the industry knowledge to develop and adopt a micro vehicle that is enabled to collect and share relevant data with cities and policymakers according to their needs and the users’ requirements has not been popular in recent research, which puts M2EPIC in the vanguard of the development of micromobility solutions that are beneficial for all, generate industry development and policy-making for micromobility, which has been an endeavour in the last years. References European Commission. (2020). Sustainable and smart mobility strategy: Putting European transport on track for the future. In European Commission. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52020DC0789