Siemens’ acquisitions allow ‘door-to-door mobility’

Siemens says its recent acquisitions will provide travellers with a complete set of tools to improve mobility. “It’s about re-imagining the way people travel, not just from A to B but from A to Z,” Marcus Welz, president and CEO of Siemens Intelligent Transportation Systems, told Daily News. “We are using technology as an enabler to get on top of the various challenges people face: individual transport, public transport, the first and last mile – and everything in between.” Siemens has added three software
June 7, 2018 Read time: 2 mins
Marcus Welz of Siemens

189 Siemens says its recent acquisitions will provide travellers with a complete set of tools to improve mobility. “It’s about re-imagining the way people travel, not just from A to B but from A to Z,” Marcus Welz, president and CEO of Siemens Intelligent Transportation Systems, told Daily News. “We are using technology as an enabler to get on top of the various challenges people face: individual transport, public transport, the first and last mile – and everything in between.”

Siemens has added three software companies to its urban mobility portfolio in the last year: HaCon (journey planning), Bytemark (mobile ticketing) and Aimsun (traffic management/simulation).

“We had a lot of ingredients in our portfolio,” Welz went on. But the technology that the new firms bring would allow Siemens to provide “door-to-door mobility”. Marrying public transport with newer, private entrants to the market such as Uber and Lyft by more efficient use of data is vital, Siemens believes. Combining planning, booking, managing and paying for a trip into a single city-owned app is the way to go.

“The road user-centric approach is very important,” Welz insists. “To get me out of my car it has got to be convenient, efficient and attractive.” Travellers also need the security that a multimodal mobility system will work when you switch from one mode – such as bus – to another – such as carshare – without a hitch, he added.

Improved safety and more efficient traffic management are the two pillars of digitalisation, Welz continues. “Digitalisation is not just a buzzword,” he says. “Using historical data and predictive analytics can change traffic flow at an intersection, for example.”

Booth 319   

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • US Cities push for smarter poles
    June 25, 2018
    US Cities The need to connect existing infrastructure has led various US transit authorities into imaginative alleyways: David Crawford examines some new roles for street furniture. US cities are vying with each other in developing schemes to create a new generation of connected places. Their strategies include taking advantage of their streetlight poles’ height and ubiquity to give them new roles in supporting intelligent nodes. They are now being equipped for collecting real-time data on key transport
    Read More
  • Promoting cycling is the solution to congestion and pollution
    August 20, 2015
    Cycling offers health, air quality and road space/parking benefits, promoting governments and the EU to look at tax and technology initiatives. David Crawford reports. One way to improve urban air quality is to make green alternatives to car use financially attractive. Incentivising employees to switch their travel-to-work mode to using their own bikes could increase cycling’s modal share of commuting travel by 50%, a recent French research project suggests. The country’s government already subsidises pu
    Read More
  • Social media a one-stop shop for travel information
    January 20, 2012
    Exponentially widening mobile phone ownership is opening up the field to new ways of obtaining and disseminating better travel information from and to public transport users, via for example social media and tracking riders' phones. Over 50 US transit agencies, including major actors such as TriMet, in the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon, Dallas Area Rapid Transit in Texas, and San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), as well as smaller operators, now have Facebook and/or Twitter accoun
    Read More
  • Transit in a time of protest
    July 13, 2020
    Street demonstrations at times create tricky balancing acts for public transportation providers - and the recent Black Lives Matter protests have also put a spotlight on the deeper problem of ‘infrastructural racism’…
    Read More

Highlighted Content