The holy grail in the world of route planners is a dynamic, personal, multi-modal route planner. A planner that can direct you at any moment and any place to the best or easiest route available. A planner that keeps your personal preferences in mind and can choose between all possible means of transportation. Such a planner is still a far cry from what is available nowadays (as seems appropiate for a grail) and for that reason it is good that the fourth meeting of the Smart City SDK project took place in Istanbul, on 18 and 19 October 2012.
During the workshop lead by Waag, we looked at the different travel scenarios with representatives of the participating cities in the project. It showed that there are big differences accross Europe; e.g. combining more than three different ways of transport on a journey in cities like Lamia (Greece), Rome and Istanbul occurs far more often than with us. In certain places, information about ongoing strikes is essential, while Helsinki would like to have relevant data for their rowing (!) travellers.
De workshop gave us some insights in the datasets that users would need, in relation to the (non) available (open) datasets. During the project more new data will be released. The province of Rome just opened their real-time traffic data. Also, the traffic department of the City of Amsterdam soon hopes to share the flow data of traffic. Meanwhile Waag researches which crowdsourced data could be a useful addition to that.
To get insight in the real needs of users, local customs and available data sets is important for the development of a mobility app developed by Waag. This application will be an important tool to measure the success of this project (standardization and exchangeability) and further testing.
