Taxi of the future: Big data analysis as a framework for future Urban fleets in smart cities

Abstract

Smart city needs smart mobility-travel should be made as convenient as possible through sustainable urban transport solutions. Transportation systems in many parts of the world are facing unprecedented challenges in the 21st century as increasing population, urbanization, and motorization growth continue to pressure these systems. Hence, cities need smart planning for a sustainable future, and this calls for greater governance across all levels of transportation decision making. Reimagining the role of information technologies (IT) and connectivity in today's cities enables us to realize the promise of smart mobility through the Internet of Things (IoT) which provides interlinking of vast networks, devices, and data which have thus far never been linked. As such, one of the strategies for smart cities to overcome the urban-mobility challenge is to spearhead the technological leap with big data. Within the frame of smart cities, leveraging big data and IoT is considered to be a key enabler for transforming urban mobility system towards higher flexibility and better integration with existing transport modes, as well as providing smart and sustainable mobility solutions such as sharing concepts, electric vehicles, and autonomous driving. However, the prerequisite for taking advantage of big-data analytics is to first address the issues of data availability and accessibility. Hence, by highlighting the need for urban data, this paper aims to draw attention to the taxi as an essential part of future urban fleets in smart cities for the shift towards sustainable mobility. Taxis solve a niche in the urban-mobility system as they provide to the general public flexible, door-to-door services. Such a semi-private character enables full-area coverage to better support travel demands, and thus the taxi industry has a significant function in the mobility system. However, compared to other transport modes, the taxi is often overlooked and receives little attention from planners and policy makers. So what does the taxi of the future look like? The project "Future Urban Taxi" rethinks the taxi from bottom up. It focuses on how the taxi: (1) as a vehicle, has to adapt to user demands and specific urban contexts; and (2) as a system, can be integrated into the mobility web of a city in a more effective and sustainable way. This is one of the sub-projects under the initiative "Ambient Mobility Lab" which is supported with funding by the Ministry of Finance and Economics of the federal state Baden-Württemberg in Germany.