THOUGHT LEADERSHIP | SMART MOBILITY
MOVING PEOPLE and the economy Whether it’s for leisure, business or employment, in order to function, every level of society needs to interconnect to make the wheels of the economy turn. Alastair Currie speaks to Bongani MthombeniMöller, director of Royal HaskoningDHV’s Smart Mobility Advisory Group for Southern Africa, about theoretical and practical interventions. Bongani Mthombeni-Möller, director of Royal HaskoningDHV’s Smart Mobility Advisory Group for Southern Africa
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IMIESA February 2022
How would you define smart mobility? BM Spatial planning and transportation are integral parts of urban developments that sustain economies and communities. For me, smart mobility refines this by adopting an intelligent approach that results in cleaner, safer, more efficient and convenient modes of transport that also reduce climate impacts. Examples include real-time traffic management systems that optimise vehicle movements to minimise congestion during peak periods. Smart mobility systems embrace cloudbased technologies to communicate and synch with each other, with a host of new apps being developed for users to access and leverage this to their advantage. Today, for example, consumers can order transportation instantly on their smartphones. Then there’s the new wave of artificially intelligent vehicles that instantly respond and correct to ensure that everyone stays safely within their lane, while anticipating and responding automatically to potential threats to more vulnerable road users, like cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians. Safety speaks to the heart of smart mobility. From an infrastructure perspective, that includes implementing a prevention and prediction mechanism, using technologies like digital twinning to overlay live data on virtual models to verify the current status of a road and simulate planned interventions. These could include pothole
repairs, stormwater improvements and carriageway upgrades. In this respect, Royal HaskoningDHV is one of the most progressive in embracing new mobility models, both within its home base in the Netherlands, as well as all the other countries it operates in. Each country has its own unique experiences, which include evolving transportation patterns. In South Africa’s case, for example, there’s been a major shift from traditional freight and passenger rail to an increasing reliance on road base transport. However, the shift is more reactive than strategic because, in this case, a steady deterioration in rail services has forced the issue, with knock-on effects in terms of rising infrastructure maintenance and higher transportation costs.
South Africa’s public transport model needs an urgent revamp. What are the practical first steps? Going forward, we first need to ask ourselves what South Africa’s future mobility model should look like in our lifetime. In other words, what can we realistically change now? Presently, we see modes of transport competing rather than complementing each other, an example being the informal taxi industry versus conventional city and suburban bus services. Moving for ward, government’s evolving institutional framework will be a major contributor to positive smart mobility developments. Gautrain is an excellent example of a mobility solution that works ver y well in practice with its high-speed rail and bus connection model. However, due
