Travelling smart in Genoa: Hitachi Rail's pioneering mobility project

Smart mobility is a concept most people living in UK cities will be familiar with, whether they realise it or not. London’s Oyster Card, for example, was introduced almost twenty years ago. Today, it allows access to the capital’s multimodal network of buses, tubes, trains, trams, water taxis and even Boris Johnson’s much-maligned cable car.

In recent times, smartphones have displaced the Oyster for many commuters, inbuilt NFC and wallets negating the need for a standalone card. Regardless of whether you use a card or a phone, Transport for London (TfL) knows where customers tap in and out across its network, although the exact nature of your journey may not always be clear.

For a truly seamless travel experience – and one where the operator has full visibility over journeys - the next phase of smart mobility will see our phones acting as smart ticketing devices, granting frictionless access to different modes of transport while also delivering a holistic view of a city’s entire transit network. Passengers benefit from streamlined, integrated travel, while operators have a rich data source to improve services, and smart cities can start bragging about their IQs.