With The Right App, Shared Mobility Could Revive Public Transit

Why take the bus, has been the threat, when you could summon a driverless car to your door? Some European countries are finding that more people use public transit if it's combined with door-to-door service. And there's an app for that.
"Switzerland is still a country where people love the trains. They are always on time. They are running every half hour and they are very proud of that," said Michael Frankenberg, managing director of the German engineering firm HaCon Ingenieurgesellschaft.
"They think the biggest competitor is the car, and (unlike the car) they cannot bring people from door to door. So if they want to go door to door, they have to integrate other means of transport."
The Swiss railway, SBB, tackled this problem with SBB Reiseplaner, an app that integrates every form of transportation available, including not only arrival times and costs, but ticket purchases.
"They integrated taxi, Uber, car sharing, bike sharing, and you can buy everything in one step, so you can rent your car directly without going out of the app, you can buy the train ticket, so everything is integrated within one app."
The German railway has done something similar with its Qixxit app, and the Austrian government has BusBahnBim, which promises "you will always find the best route in all of Austria: whether by public transport, on foot, by bike or by car." In the United States, private mobility apps provide multi-modal trip planning for some cities—Citymapper, Transit, and Movit among them—but they trade mostly in public data.
Without government clout, it's harder to also sell the tickets.
But the U.S. has the same demand for integrated modes of transportation, said Neal Hemenover, chief information officer for Transdev North America.
"People want to customize their transportation," Hemenover said. "They want to have a say in where they can go and what they can do, and they’re looking for all these kinds of apps that can navigate the best route possible, so the move to mobility as a service or a platform that allows people to make those decisions is pretty huge, it’s a big driver. And honestly, when you go from city to city, every local transport may have their own app."
Hemenover and Frankenberg appeared Monday at "Mobility Goes Digital," a forum sponsored by the German American Chamber of Commerce on the occasion of a German business delegation to Chicago headed by Olaf Lies, minister of economics, labor and transportation for the German state of Niedersachsen, also known as Lower Saxony.
To succeed, efforts like Switzerland's Reiseplaner needed common standards for data, Frankenberg said.
"My wish is to be more interoperable between the different solutions. That means to develop standards where data can be exchanged, where things can be exchanged, where you can open with one app the cars for different car manufacturers. I think it is very important to be more and more open for that kind of standards."
In Switzerland, he said, commuters are learning public transit is not only cheaper than private car use, but sometimes faster. "Sometimes those results are even better than taking your own car." And that's making public transit more acceptable.
The next step, he said, is an app for transit drivers.
"Around the world the only people who are not using a navigation system are the bus drivers."