FIWARE Foundation Signs Onto the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities

May 18, 2020

  • By signing the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities, FIWARE Foundation joins 180+ organizations worldwide committed to ensuring sustainable, efficient, and collaborative Smart Mobility frameworks;
  • New and disruptive technologies are already (lightning fast) changing the way people move, live, work, and socialize in cities and actions must be taken today to ensure tomorrow’s sustainable digital future;
  • With this approach, FIWARE Foundation intends to kickstart a long-term collaboration with NUMO, the New Urban Mobility alliance.

Berlin, May 18, 2020 — FIWARE Foundation, the non-profit organization that encourages the adoption of open standards — implemented using Open Source technologies — for the development of smart solutions on a global basis, announces today that it has signed on to the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities. Produced in 2018 by a working group of NGOs, the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities are a guiding framework for urban decision-makers and stakeholders to navigate the shifting transportation landscape, while prioritizing the best outcomes for all. The principles have already been signed by nearly 200 organizations and include ten goals towards a global sustainable, efficient, and collaborative Smart Mobility framework, which is fully supported by FIWARE Foundation.

  1. We plan our cities and their mobility together.
  2. We prioritize people over vehicles.
  3. We support the shared and efficient use of vehicles, lanes, curbs, and land.
  4. We engage with stakeholders.
  5. We promote equity.
  6. We lead the transition towards a zero-emission future and renewable energy.
  7. We support fair user fees across all modes.
  8. We aim for public benefits via open data.
  9. We work towards integration and seamless connectivity.
  10. We support that autonomous vehicles in dense urban areas should be operated only in shared fleets.

At the Forefront of Innovation

For years, FIWARE Foundation has been driving its international, large Community to further tap into the potential presented by Open Source technologies to deliver interoperable and sustainable smart digital solutions, ensuring that vendor lock-in remains a thing of the past. On that front, FIWARE Open Source technology has been successfully used in the development of smart solutions, ranging from Japan to Uruguay, and Canada to Finland, getting cities and regions ready for their smarter digital future.

New and disruptive technologies are surely changing the way people move, live, work, and socialize in cities. In many sectors, opportunities and challenges are growing at the same speed as that at which such innovative technologies rise. Today’s decisions will heavily impact what tomorrow’s infrastructure will look like and it’s vital that we act now. Hence, signing onto such relevant principles is a natural step for FIWARE Foundation.

“The Shared Mobility Principles provide a solid, crystal clear pathway for cities as well as relevant alignment between city governments, private companies, and NGOs working towards making cities sustainably more livable. At FIWARE Foundation, we strive to help our 325+ members — as well as our strategic global partners and collaborators — to develop smart solutions that closely follow open standards’ principles and are Open Source. We are firm believers that the future of Smart Mobility is made of platforms, services, and infrastructures that mirror the needs of citizens and value sustainability. Hence, we couldn’t have been happier to be the latest signatory of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities”, said Ulrich Ahle, FIWARE Foundation CEO.

FIWARE and NUMO

Besides committing to such principles and promoting them within the FIWARE Community, FIWARE Foundation aims to kickstart a long-term collaboration with the NUMO alliance and will be working on a Technical MoU on data models, to be signed by both organizations in the near future. When it comes to smart applications, a well-crafted data model can ease the interaction between developers and users, ensuring, among many other things, higher quality, reduced cost, and better performance of solutions. Founded in 2019 as an outgrowth of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities, NUMO convenes diverse allies and leverages the momentum of significant revolutions in mobility to address urban issues — such as sustainability, equity, accessibility and labor — impacted by the shifting transportation landscape.

Together with the NUMO alliance, FIWARE Foundation will call for more resilient and secure Smart Mobility alternatives for society. More importantly, this collaboration adds weight to FIWARE’s long-standing commitment to secure a pathway in which smart solutions are Open Source, citizen-centric, and interoperable. Common standards for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and data models are at the heart of platforms and digital infrastructures, enabling the interoperability and portability of solutions. In order to successfully make it into the market today, new smart services and solutions must be able to securely communicate with other services and devices, traversing a multitude of infrastructures and systems. This way, solution providers benefit from knowing that their solutions can be connected with other applications or pieces of software — already developed and widely available — or that they can replicate them for multiple customers with rather low adaptation costs.

About FIWARE Foundation

Founded in 2016 by Atos, Engineering, Orange and Telefónica, FIWARE Foundation is a non-profit organization that drives the definition — and the Open Source implementation — of key open de-facto standards that ease the development of portable and interoperable smart solutions across the domains of Smart Cities, Smart Energy, Smart AgriFood and Smart Industry, in a faster, easier and affordable way that avoids vendor lock-in scenarios, whilst also nourishing FIWARE as a sustainable and innovation-driven business model. The foundation does that with the support of its growing international Community, the 160+ global solutions currently featured in its Marketplace, dozens FIWARE iHubs, FIWARE Lab Nodes and FIWARE’s strategic global partners that share a common vision and combines their efforts toward making FIWARE the Open Source technology of choice for industries, governments, universities, and associations to reach their full potential and scale up their activities, thereby, entering new markets and growing their businesses.

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Press Contact
Val De Oliveira: valdirene.deoliveira@fiware.org

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