Since the first overview of SMARTIN pilot activities, the four pilot sites have continued moving from planning towards practical implementation. Across Barcelona, Budapest, Latvia and Turin, partners are refining the tools, data flows and local arrangements that will allow each pilot to test smart mobility solutions in real-life conditions. Progress is visible not only on the technical side, but also in addressing the practical realities of implementation: working with local stakeholders, preparing digital tools, identifying infrastructure needs, dealing with data quality, and ensuring that each solution responds to the specific mobility challenges of its local mobility context.
Barcelona: Towards safer and more responsive micromobility management
The Spanish pilot is moving from concept definition to the technical preparation of the tools that will support safer shared urban spaces for pedestrians, cyclists and micromobility users. Recent work has focused on defining how pilot results will be assessed, including how to measure improvements in safety, usability and mobility management, and on preparing the digital components, including a user-facing mobile application and a dashboard for municipal use. These tools are expected to help connect information from users and local authorities to support more informed decisions on how shared urban space is managed.
Stakeholder engagement was structured around a co-creation workshop with municipal departments, researchers and mobility stakeholders, covering pilot goals, infrastructure analysis, and social and emotional impacts. Participants validated the focus on safer, more comfortable active mobility, and identified priority challenges: discontinuous cycle lanes, congested pedestrian areas, conflict hotspots around major interchanges, and weak coordination across administrative borders. The discussion also helped refine pilot scope by linking SMARTIN tools – the Decision Theatre, RideWise BCN app, Lane Patrol/Cycle-RAP and computer vision-based defect detection – with governance, data management and citizen communication needs. A key insight from earlier stakeholder discussions that continues to shape the work is the importance of framing the pilot not only around micromobility behaviour, but around its interactions with the wider urban mobility ecosystem, including cars, mopeds and public space constraints.
Budapest: Building the foundations for smarter passenger vessel operations
The pilot is progressing towards a clearer design for its digital support tool for passenger vessel traffic on the Danube. The solution is expected to combine several modules into a shared platform serving boatmasters, operators, passengers and other stakeholders, improving the information available to boatmasters for safer operational decisions, while also making travel information more accessible to tourists and passengers.
Stakeholder engagement is taking place through bilateral meetings and multilateral workshops, involving most of the relevant organisations: cabin and tourist vessel operator representatives, water police, the shipping authority, the RIS provider, the transport safety bureau and technology providers. Their feedback has been useful in refining the plans and identifying additional items to be developed.
So far, seven main modules have been identified: incident detection, an alerting system, safe route suggestions, shared schedule information, safe water depth display, other notifications, and a dashboard bringing all of these elements together. One of the main challenges now is integrating these technical components into one coherent platform, while keeping the final solution practical, affordable and aligned with real operational needs.
Latvia: Turning transport data into better regional mobility decisions
The Latvia pilot is advancing the development of an optimisation tool to support more data-driven planning of regional bus and rail services. The tool will help analyse indicators such as service occupancy, profitability and performance across routes and stops, with a major focus on delivering useful insights even where inputs must be estimated or supported by predefined assumptions.
Stakeholder engagement followed an iterative, two-stage approach. First, a series of in-depth interviews was conducted with ATD planning experts, who act as the primary users of the system. These discussions focused on identifying current challenges and stakeholders, exploring needs, and defining detailed requirements for the optimisation tool. Preliminary results and identified requirements were then presented to a broader group, including the Ministry of Transport, planning regions, a country-level city and a transport operator, to validate the scope and relevance and ensure alignment with national planning practices and stakeholder expectations.
A key challenge throughout the process is data availability, fragmentation and quality: inconsistent and incomplete datasets significantly limit reliable analysis and optimisation. The pilot is now moving towards more detailed workflow planning and further tool development, building on the technical work already completed.
Turin: Preparing the ground for dynamic lane management
Turin is moving closer to real-world implementation of a dynamic lane management system designed to improve how road space is shared between different transport modes. Local partners are working directly in the test area to define where cameras, variable message signs, road markings and fixed signs will be placed. A practical priority is reducing excavation and limiting cable installation, especially in a tree-lined avenue with restrictions to protect the urban environment. The team is also assessing technical equipment, including cameras that can track vehicle movement without relying on number plates, helping to address privacy concerns. Baseline values, especially for public transport performance, are now being calculated, so the pilot can compare conditions before and after the dynamic lane is introduced.
Stakeholder engagement started at the very beginning of the project with an in-person workshop to rapidly build consensus on potential test areas, and stakeholders have remained actively involved since. Following the identification of the test area, bilateral and multilateral meetings now focus on key implementation aspects: equipment installation (with equipment providers, the City of Turin, 5T and IREN), energy supply (IREN), permitting procedures (City of Turin), and the messages to be communicated to road users (also City of Turin).
Looking ahead
In the coming months, the SMARTIN pilots will continue preparing for implementation and testing, finalising technical specifications, refining digital tools, confirming infrastructure arrangements, improving data inputs and calculating baseline values to measure future impact. As deployment approaches, the focus will increasingly shift from design and preparation to real-world testing, monitoring and learning. The aim is to generate useful evidence for other cities and regions interested in replicating similar smart mobility solutions.
