Urbanization leads to increased transport of people and goods in cities, which creates more complex traffic systems where vehicles and vulnerable road users need to interact. This development has a substantial societal, environmental and economic impact affecting people's safety and health (e.g. accidents, air pollution) as well as transport efficiency (e.g. increased congestion). Investing in new physical infrastructure is needed but is usually very expensive and cities need to find more cost effective ways to plan and manage traffic. New digital and connected solutions based such as (CCAM) are being developed with a potential to effectively reduce these issues. Cities are trying to figure out how these solutions can be used and efficiently integrated into existing systems targeting challenges such as data management, governance structuring, policy development, user acceptance, etc.
One of these technologies, regarded to have a major role for various solutions within urban traffic planning and management is geofencing. The technology can influence speed, powertrain and access control, and has the potential to become a powerful tool for cities in creating and maintaining more sustainable and high-quality urban spaces for their citizens by increasing traffic safety, lowering emissions, ensuring better traffic management, increasing the comfort of driving and increase transport efficiency and mobility.
GeoSence elaborates on geofencing solutions aiming at improving traffic flow, safety and air quality. Challenges on how to obtain user acceptance and useful improvements are addressed.
The project is the first of its kind investigating the implementation of geofencing and its impact from a holistic perspective, working closely with local planning authorities. The overall objective of GeoSence is to design, trial and evaluate new geofencing concepts and solutions for specific cases in cities and to propose new ways on how to deploy different geofencing applications.
This will be supported by:
1. Running tests, demonstrations and evaluations in participating
cities,
2. Applying methodologies for understanding and approaching user acceptance of the technology for various use cases.
3. Measuring improvement potentials with surveys and data collection for different challenges and providing
tangible evidence of impacts of solutions.
4. Establishing a legal and
governance framework for the infrastructural, vehicle registration, data
access, etc. requirements of
geofencing functionalities.
5. Developing strategic implementation guidelines for geofencing solutions. This includes tackling
challenges, describing systems, setting operational requirements for implementation and showing how to
integrate geofencing into SUMPs/SULPs.
Key results:
1. Survey results on challenges and needs from cities and national authorities perspectives and identification of key use cases
2. Empirical results of stakeholder acceptance
analyses including behavioural changes, participatory processes and
recommendations on how to overcome
acceptability related barriers
3. Increased understanding of how policy/legislation combined with governance can be used to scale up
geofencing
4. Report on Impact assessment showing
robust data from demonstrations with benefits of geofencing solutions.
5. A strategic implementation
guideline that provides local planning authorities recommendations and appropriate
actions to take to implement the
technology.
6. Integration of geofencing guidelines into existing strategies and guides on a city level (partners) and EU level,
SUMPs/SULPs.
About GeoSence:
The project is a Joint programme initiative (JPI) Urban Europe project funded by European Union´s Horizon 2020 and gather project partners from Germany, Norway, Sweden and UK. GeoSence project period is April 2021 to March 2024 with a budget of approx 1,6 million euros.
Partnership: City of Gothenburg, City of Munich, Stockholm stad, Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA), Chalmers University of Technology, RISE, SINTEF, Technical University of Dresden, University of Westminster & CLOSER.
Support partners: ALICE, City of Helmond, City of London, City of Madrid, London European Partnership for Transport (LEPT), POLIS, Swedish Transport Administration, Volvo Group.
Use case Gothenburg
This use case addresses geofencing in public procurement, i.e. how to describe requirements for geofencing functionality and how to follow up compliance to the requirements stated in the contract between the city and a traffic operator. The aim is to ensure that speed limits are being respected especially around areas where vulnerable road users are e.g. nearby schools. Tests will be conducted with vehicles for Special Transport Services, which serve people with disabilities. Lower speed zones than the regulated speed limited, will be set up as geofences in the traffic operators fleet management system, and equipment will be installed in the vehicles to support the drivers not to override the speed limit in these zones. The demonstration will enable user studies to evaluate drivers experiences during and after the usage of the speed limiting equipment.
Use case Stockholm
In GeoSence, Stockholm will investigate how a new innovative way of working could be developed in order to deploy geofencing and other connected solutions in their daily traffic planning/management operations. This will be done by mapping relevant existing processes including issuance, updates of local traffic rules, network editing, create new routines/processes regarding data management (e.g. sharing, storage, GDPR, data input from sensors, etc.) for all transport modes (e.g. goods, micro-mobility, , service vehicles) mainly for static geofencing but also guidelines for what is needed to be done to handle data management of dynamic and smart geofencing). Stockholm will be the first demonstrator fully adopting and integrating the geofencing strategic implementation guidelines.
Use case Munich
The City of Munich aims to implement a geofencing demonstration. An interconnection between existing geodata and vehicles of shared micro-mobility will be initiated, communicating local traffic rules on a digital channel. A monitoring & data analytics tool for shared micro-mobility will be used giving explicit information about mobility behavior and traffic impact. Geofencing defines parking, no-parking and no-go zones for e-scooters. On designated parking areas different sensor technologies improving GPS signal accuracy will be tested. Surveys will be conducted to analyze the impact and acceptance of geofencing and the sensor technologies. A monitoring and evaluation about surveillance will take place and examine the non-compliance of traffic regulations. Core questions include impact of geofencing on traffic and mobility behavior, its effectiveness compared to current standard, envisioned impact if scaled-up on city level, opinions of the users about geofencing (acceptance, privacy issues etc.) and necessary data management & traffic control strategies taking geofencing into account and applying it.
