Sustainable urban development is an essential part of the green transition – but what does it really mean? What is a sustainable city, and what does it take to create one? We dare to claim that Green Dash, the digital tool developed by InfoTiles together with advisors from the Danish branch of the international urban development company COWI, is a key part of the answer.
To plan a city's development, we need to know how people use the city today: how they move, where traffic jams occur, where drivers want to park, and which routes they take. This type of knowledge has been sought for as long as cities have existed, primarily by having people stand at intersections and count. This method is cumbersome and inaccurate, but has been the best available for city planners to base their recommendations on. In recent years, automatic counters have been used, but they are also not optimal since they only provide point counts, limiting the amount of relevant data.
COWI + InfoTiles = Green Dash
More and more Danish cars are being produced with Connected Cars integrated. Connected Cars is a solution that records data on vehicle movements, and currently, about 10% of the Danish car fleet has this technology installed as standard. When COWI and InfoTiles met at an urban tech competition in 2019, they quickly realized that a collaboration could have exciting outcomes, and Connected Cars became a key focus. InfoTiles can extract and manage large amounts of anonymous real-time data on car movements and present it in entirely new ways that provide new insights, which COWI and their clients use in planning future sustainable cities.
The 140,000 Danish cars with Connected Cars today provide a factual basis based on nearly 1 million car trips – every single day! And this number is growing as more Connected Cars hit the roads.
Where will we walk and bike in the future?
Magne Eide, CCO at InfoTiles and an enthusiastic Green Dash ambassador, says: "Everyone wants to reduce emissions from personal transport in their cities, but it's hard to know what the most effective measures are and what results are realistically achievable. With Green Dash, we can immediately see where people want to move, where they take many short trips, for example, and perhaps need better infrastructure for bikes, better public transport, or walking paths. This could lead to a reduction in car traffic and a corresponding growth in green options, whether it be public transport, sharing services, or other offerings."
Do you want to read more about this case? Read this article at cowi.no.