Helsinki, like many European cities, is facing the interconnected challenges of offering smarter, more convenient mobility services, reducing its emissions, and catering to a growing population. To face these challenges and to meet its aspirations to become the most functional city in the world, Helsinki has developed an extensive Mobility as a Service (MaaS) package – a central platform to access different modes of transport to get comfortably from location A to B without relying on a private car. With a current population of 650.000, Helsinki closely mirrors the city of Copenhagen in size and therefore is an extremely relevant destination to learn from best practices to help it overcome the same challenges.
To enable a fruitful exchange, and to work together on ideas, a small group of transport and climate planners from the greater Copenhagen area participated in a short two-day study trip to the capital region of Finland. Skåne Innovation and our partner Gate 21 planned the trip and EIT Urban Mobility was delighted to be one of the parties among officials from public transport, organisations, research, as well as private companies that joined the trip.
The program included:
- The opportunity to hear from our partners at Forum Virum – the City of Helsinki innovation organisation that creates data driven solutions for the smart city
- MaaS Global, who have created the award-winning Whim-App that enables Helsinki’s (and a number of other cities) inhabitants to use the wide array of mobility services available.
- A visit and tour of the Jätkäsaari Mobility Lab – Helsinki’s testbed for smart mobility.
We created a short film where some of the participants from Gate 21, ITS Hamburg and Tartu University discuss their key takeaways from the two day program. Take a look!
The study trip was supported by Interreg ØKS and it is planned that the trip will catalyze the planned project “100 green mobility labs in greater Copenhagen”.
