Smart Mobility – The New Way to Commute
Published on : Tuesday 07-06-2022
Smart mobility is a revolutionary approach and a defining feature of smart city, says Soundharyaa Nandakumar.
Today, the world revolves around the stock market and trading, every minute and second is calculated for the greater exponential growth in the trading industry. Even being smarter has also become one of the biggest trading activities in this world right now. When half the world is already living in cities, Tokyo is said to be the world’s largest city, Jericho the oldest, Singapore the most expensive, and which is the world’s smartest city? While Singapore is said to be the smartest, there are half a dozen others – Helsinki, Zurich, Oslo, Amsterdam, New York and Seoul competing strongly for that honour. India being one of the fastest growing economies of the world, is now investing greatly in infrastructure and transportation, in the process also transforming itself into promising smart cities.
According to the United Nations reports, although cities occupy just 3% of earth’s surface, they anchor more than 75% of global population, which stand answerable for 70% of the total energy consumption and carbon emissions. The main reason for this vast amount in energy and carbon emission is due to rapid urbanisation and growing motorisation. This growing demand for mobility leads to mobility challenges, for example, increased travel time, air pollution and congestion. To avoid this, many countries are evolving themselves into smart cities with the help of electro mobility. The acceleration towards smart mobility and the arrival of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) tends to be a quick and promising solution to long travel time and inefficient traffic management, which leads to unnecessary disruptions.
When we speak of Smart mobility, we must understand what it means –
It is a smart revolutionary approach and a defining feature of smart cities to travel back and forth and mitigate citizens' affordability, multiple transportation choices, frequent transits systems, on-demand mobility solutions, ride sharing, vehicle sharing, electric vehicles, biking, walking and even more. Intelligent Transportation Systems on the other hand is also called the new generation of sensors, an advanced application which aims to deliver innovative solutions to different modes of transportation and enables users to be better informed and safer.
Smart cities and electrification
Smart cities are always a combination of sustainable and affordable mobility and secure energy solutions which are integrated with customer-oriented infrastructure and services. The vast state of mobility and energy system convergence is normally very critical, and these critical times are those in which new technologies are born as people start to rethink the ways which are more sustainable and efficient. Everything has become smart today like Smart Mobility, Smart Water, Smart Grid, Smart Integration, etc. These smart technologies are the base for smart cities which are brought into practice today. Currently electric vehicles (EVs) are proliferating majorly and ride sharing like Uber, Ola is continuing to grow, and autonomous vehicles would also soon come in use in urban areas. Nevertheless, limited operability and digitalisation of infrastructure can make customer interaction quite challenging, because of which EV charging facilities are creating local restraints and stability problems on power grids which ends in reducing electrification efficiency. Today many public and private sector stakeholders have developed, and are developing policies and alternating their business models to align with current trends based on the energy norms.
The aim of these regulated norms and policies is to aggravate the efficiency, and mainly the economic development and electrification, which is the main factor in focus when it comes to smart cities. For example, the simpler way to encourage the spread of electric mobility is by making charging easier. Stockholm city council, for instance, allows companies to install charging columns on public property for free. Hong Kong has implemented smart payment methods for charging vehicles and has made it integral to public transport systems. Likewise, every other country and city in Europe and Asia is making their way towards connectivity, such that everything is connected and user-friendly. For the use of staying connected, countries are moving towards technologies like 5G, AI, Edge, and Cloud Computing, IoT, and many more.
Smart city technologies
As we know, without connectivity technologies like 5G, IoT, AI and Data Analytics, there are no smart cities.
Data Lake – When we talk about Data Lake, it is the cornerstone of smart cities, it plays a very important role in helping cities to be more connected and transform urban mobility to be more productive. Increasing number of IoT devices has completely changed how cities work, because everything has been squeezed inside our hands. It is proven information that an autonomous vehicle can generate 40TB of data for every eight hours of driving. City transportation departments have been leaders in using advanced analytics. Real-time data collected from sensors and other devices is helping to optimise connections between modes of transport for faster travel times, reduce the costs of operation, and increase convenience through improved information services for users. For instance, the Norwegian government has established a company, Entur, to run the national registry for all public transport in Norway.
Autonomous and Connected Vehicles – They are another innovation that is making its way into smart cities, because the future of urban vehicles is Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) and will be core to smart mobility transformation, which in result will change energy consumption, environment, fossil fuel consumption and quality of living. Sensors in vehicles will collect data about other vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, and road conditions; vehicles will become WiFi hotspots, creating an ever-moving network, from where data can easily be shared with the city authorities. They can look at patterns to assess journey times, bottlenecks, fuel and charging station availability, popular destinations, and more. They can make real-time adjustments, such as re-calibrating traffic lights to ease congestion or even using flexible pricing to flatten spikes in parking.
5G Service – The next promising technology, which is widely developing at high speed, supporting millions of devices every square kilometre. The eSIMs are developed in a way that manufacturers use them in a practical way to connect their 5G fleets. Very recently, Union Telecom and IT Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, launched a 5G test bed in IIT-Madras and made the first 5G call successfully, an end-to-end network which is fully designed and developed in India – Aatmanibhar 5G – and so on.
When we learn about technologies, smart cities, and smart mobility, it is also important to know about charging structure in detail.
Charging stations and development
When we see ourselves in the development of charging infrastructure, they are mainly developed to meet the needs of personal use vehicles, in such a way that customers can charge their vehicles either at home, business districts during the day hours of their work and also at their destination points and charging stations for public transport are also widely developed in many wide areas in huge numbers.
However, still people are hesitating to buy electric vehicles because of lack of charging availability and expensive resources, according to an old report of the UK transportation department, where a survey of 649 license holders stated their opinions on buying EVs and the charging availability.
According to a 2021 report, India is contemplated to be the fourth highest carbon emitter, and has pledged itself to net-zero (carbon emission free) by 2070 and aims to achieve EV sales of up to 30% private vehicles, 70% commercial vehicles and 80% 2-and 3-wheelers by 2030. The e-AMRIT (Accelerated e-Mobility Revolution for India Transportation) portal states that as of December 2021, a total of 7,96,000 EVs are registered so far, and 1,800 public EV stations are installed. The aim is to install charging stations in the ratio of 1 public charger for 10 EVs. For instance, EV charging network company ChargeZone is installing charging points in India to power more than 500 electric buses and has currently over 125 cities wide super-fast DC points that are also app-driven in cities such as Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Patna, Lucknow, etc., along with partnering help of the respective State department. Since early 2019, ChargeZone has been developing charging hubs for many e-mobility companies such as Ashok Leyland, Volvo, GreenCell Mobility, etc.
These details of charging here might not be up to date, but it states how progressive we are. Because we say India is progressively adopting EVs in terms of autonomous, connected, electric, shared (ACES) vehicles, but is there any proof that we are fully connected? No. Like how we are called a ‘developing country’, we are still a developing state in every aspect. We are not connected fully. Because of the existing and regulated norms, policies, and business models, it is not very easy to be connected all in one place; it would definitely take some time. But in my opinion, to become zero emission by 2070 is quite a long time, when every other continent and country is planning to be zero emission by 2030-2050, for instance. Many OEMs in Germany have planned to close their IC engine manufacturing units and concentrate more on EVs and their battery development.
Especially taking into consideration all these environmental and climatic changes, we as Indian citizens have together to achieve zero emission before 2070. It is not a persuasion to change from ICE vehicles to EV, it is just a more effective sustainable choice and surely as far as India is concerned, there is always going to be room for ICE vehicles.
Soundharyaa Nandakumar has done her Masters in Mechatronics and Cyber-Physical System in Germany and presently working as a Test Engineer, testing Vehicle Electronic Control Units in Connected Drive department. Her previous work experience as an automobile technician has given her a good understanding of how beautiful the car/vehicle is with intricate designs and unbelievable technologies inside. This craze and passion for cars made the decision for her to pursue a career in Automotive Technology.
In her own words, “I always compare cars to women, because we never know what is inside them, how mysterious they are with n number of technologies evolving around every day making them futuristic statements – just like women – undergoing many things in a day to be strong enough to conquer the world.”