Efficiently curbing transport CO2 emissions through AI

In April 2022, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate change impacts and adaptation. If there is one takeaway from this whole dense report, it is this: we must act swiftly and slash emissions by nearly half by 2030. If we don’t, we are locking ourselves into dangerous levels of warming, i.e. above +2 C°, with the most catastrophic impacts of a changing climate. For this purpose, we need to use all tools at our disposal to decrease emissions wherever we can and as soon as we can. More generally, we should make maximum use of low-carbon solutions throughout the economy, including industrial processes, agriculture, AND transportation.

As a matter of fact, transport accounts for 24% of global emissions, and its emissions are rising faster than any other sector. At the COP26, Greenpeace recommended transition to new mobility service business models as one key way forward for governments, cities and transport providers to accelerate their journey to net zero. Cities contribute major climate impact, but also a crucial part of the solution, offering significant opportunities for emissions reductions, through lower energy consumption (such as by creating walkable and bikeable cities) and electrification of transport. By aggressively pursuing electric and fuel-efficient vehicles as well as public transit and bikes, cities and governments could take a big bite out of our emissions and reap the co-benefits (cleaner air, reduced congestion, etc.)

For the past few years, Vianova’s work has been supporting low-carbon mobility solutions, like micro and shared mobility, gradually replacing driving trips in cities. Through its mobility intelligence platform, used by forward thinking cities and leading mobility providers across the globe, Vianova has been enabling faster and better decisions about more cycling lanes, more dedicated mobility hubs and progressively removing cars from city centres. Indeed, shared mobility (e-scooters, e-bikes, etc.) represents a significant opportunity to transition more citizens to sustainable, space-efficient, and human scale modes of transport. Yet these services also cause challenges (e.g. improper vehicle storage, unsafe riding, profits maximisation, cost optimization, etc.) which could ultimately curtail their effectiveness as part of the climate solution.

Building on top of our existing platform and in partnership with our friends at the global transport consultancy Rebel Group, Vianova has been developing an exciting new feature — Mobility Policy Auto-Tuner (MPAT) — specifically designed to help cities plan and communicate highly targeted policy solutions that are not just about regulating and resolving the “bad” aspects of shared mobility, but also optimising and promoting the “good” ones, starting with a CO2-optimized distribution of shared fleets. The MPAT will allow policymakers to increase shared mobility in areas where it would lead to net CO2 savings by:

• identifying those areas where regulations or infrastructure (such as mandatory device rebalancing, or a mobility hub) should be implemented in order to nudge citizens into greater shared mobility usage, shifting travel to light low-carbon travel modes
• anticipating the ‘alternative carbon footprint’ of a trip that would be taken by a shared transport mode
• modelling the potential impact of the policy from a CO2 perspective over time
• monitoring whether the implemented policies truly achieve the predicted CO2 emissions reductions
• recalibrating the AI algorithm to suggest better regulations given the tracked outcomes

Policymakers can then collaborate with shared mobility providers to find suitable policies or incentives that achieve the recommended fleet sizes in those highlighted areas (e.g. setting minimum fleet sizes, offering price incentives to users, etc.). After the policies are implemented , MPAT tracks their impact on shared mobility trips and CO2 emissions, while the AI adaptively learns which policies work best to achieve CO2 savings. This AI-driven feedback loop informs future policymaking in both the policymaker’s city as well as in the entire network of cities using the MPAT tool, thus fostering collective intelligence toward global reductions of CO2 emissions.

Running some predictive models across the different geographies we are operating in, we forecasted that our solution could help the cities and mobility providers we are working with save up to 1'000 tons of CO2 by EoY 2022. Once implemented at scale, our solution could potentially reduce by 10% the energy consumption of transportation over 5 years in partner cities: according to the IPCC report, reducing transportation emissions by about 60% would be consistent with the 1.5 C° target mentioned above; with 30% reductions, we could still stay below the 2 C° threshold. By helping mobility providers optimize their distribution of shared vehicles and cities identify the precise policies that will achieve the highest CO2 emission reduction through the optimal performance of the shared mobility ecosystem as a whole, Vianova positions itself at the forefront of climate action in urban environments.

Vianova’s Head of Policy, Alexander Pazuchanics, expressed excitement about this forward-thinking tool: “As a former policymaker (i.e. City of Seattle, City of Pittsburgh) I think one of the biggest challenges is to actually quantify the impact of your policy, particularly around CO2. So we’re trying to give cities and mobility providers both a reasonable projection beforehand and a good indication during implementation, rather than making them wait years for a carbon accounting.”

Through the European Commission funded Ai4Cities project, this tool is currently being piloted through collaborative development with the cities of Amsterdam and Tallinn, alongside the mobility operators working there. This application has the potential to grow into a powerful tool for streamlining the process between identifying goals and evaluating outcomes. The approach has widespread application beyond shared mobility and into other users of public space such as taxis, paratransit, delivery services, and eventually drones or autonomous vehicles. Another innovation of MPAT is that, unlike the majority of shared mobility tools on the market today, we are seeking to move beyond just focusing on questions of compliance and adherence to public order and instead develop policies focused on sustainable outcomes and decarbonization. At Vianova, we are happy to support this paradigm shift to move policymaking from punitive and regressive regulation on the negative consequences of shared mobility and toward the positive, incentive-based regulation aligning the city’s goals with delivery of impactful results.

About Vianova

Vianova is the trusted mobility intelligence platform for cities and mobility providers to achieve CarbonZero and VisionZero. Our data platform helps transport providers and cities, better integrate and manage shared, connected, electric and autonomous transport solutions in the urban space, enabling better use of city infrastructure, and promoting safer and more sustainable mobility. Vianova has offices in Paris, Zürich and London.

If you have any comment that you would like to share with Vianova, please send your comments to hello@vianova.io. If you would like to learn more about what it is like to work at Vianova, and join our talented team, visit our job-board or send directly your application to jobs@vianova.io.

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