Cities cannot transform mobility alone. It’s time for a new approach to collaboration.

Reflections from the TIA Leadership Forum in London, by Rikesh Shah, Chair of the Transport Innovation Alliance

Cities face an increasingly urgent challenge: delivering safer streets, cleaner transport and more accessible mobility at a time when public finances are under pressure and technological change is accelerating.

But cities can’t simply wait for national governments to lead and provide budgets on transport innovation. And the solutions will not come from industry acting in isolation.

We require a different approach to collaboration — one that brings public-sector leadership, private-sector innovation and shared expertise together around measurable outcomes.

That was the central message emerging from the Transport Innovation Alliance Leadership Forum in London this October, where more than 30 city and industry leaders came together to explore how we can move from ambition to implementation.

As Chair of the Alliance, I believe our greatest opportunity is not simply to identify the next generation of mobility solutions but to create the conditions in which cities can adopt, scale and benefit from them.

Why collaboration needs to change

• Cities understand the problems but cannot always access the expertise, technology or investment required to solve them. Industry has capabilities that can help, but solutions need to respond to actual city priorities.
• Too much innovation remains trapped in pilots. Cities and companies need to work together on procurement, standards, interoperability and scaling so successful projects can become mainstream practice.
• Collaboration must be driven by outcomes rather than products. Instead of asking which new technologies cities should adopt, the starting question should be what outcomes they want to achieve and how industry can help deliver them.

Around 19,000 people die on Europe’s roads every year. Air pollution and inactivity put pressure on health budgets that transport alone can’t fix. Europe spends roughly two trillion euros a year on public procurement with a significant portion of that on mobility and cities, a huge lever if we use it well.

When we met in Barcelona earlier this year in May, our steering group rightfully pushed us to go deeper. So we have launched a new alliance for mobility built around three themes: Vision Zero, Net Zero, and Data, Governance and Policy.

At the London meeting we had interactive breakout sessions, each led by city working group chairs. It meant every city and industry partner in the room had a voice, and we could challenge each other constructively.

Vision Zero: our streets have new users

Road safety progress is slower than any of us want, even in well-funded cities. Money alone won’t get us to zero. It takes a systematic approach.

Our streets are changing fast. Delivery robots, new types of e-bike and gig-economy delivery models all compete for the same space. Our breakout sessions kept coming back to the same questions: who gets the space, and how do we design it for safety? Street design has to catch up.

We also talked about moving from reacting to crashes to predicting and preventing them. New data sources, including connected vehicle data, can give us a far better picture of risk. The hard part remains closing the gap between pilot and policy: test, iterate, then scale.

Net Zero: no one left behind

Decarbonisation only works if it works for everyone. If cities spend heavily on sustainability, the people who most need better transport can’t be the ones left out.

The Net Zero sessions explored equity, electrification and how we use public space, including what charging and future vehicles use mean for our kerbs and streets. We heard how bike share is part of the answer. We also heard from a city whose vision goes well beyond mobility, to better places and long-term futures. That is the right ambition.

Data, governance and policy

Without good data, Vision Zero and Net Zero are just slogans. Day two made that case.

We started with a practical framework for deploying AI in transport agencies. Plenty of organisations say they need an AI strategy; far fewer know what that means in practice. We then looked at why cities need one interoperable, standards-based approach to data, rather than a patchwork of systems. Industry partners showed how operator data can support city goals, and how the public and private sectors can share it responsibly.

What happens next

Across the two days we explored seven sub-topics. That’s too many to do well, so with our working group chairs we’ve chosen three priorities:

1. Street design for safe cities.
2. Public space and EV infrastructure.
3. Data use and governance.

Over the coming weeks we’ll turn these into specific questions and outcomes, then open them up to cities across our network. Virtual working groups will run through the year. The aim is practical outputs: case studies and reports, frameworks with shared principles and best practices, and evidence that cities can use in conjunction with our private sector partners to accelerate net zero and vision zero.

My thanks to everyone who took part, to our working group chairs, to London for hosting, to BCG for hosting us, and to the Cities Today team.

If your city or organisation wants to be part of this work, please get in touch. You can find further information and details of our working groups here: www.transport-innovation.com

Photo by Bryan Brittos on Unsplash