The challenge we have embraced in 2014, well ahead of its time, is to organize in a single system the entire mobility of a province in the North of Italy, with a plurality of means of transport operating in a complementary way on the territory. With a modern language, we can say that we have implemented a MaaS solution, when the word “MaaS” circulated only among a few insiders.
In this project we played a leading role, which saw us not only as a technical supplier of the MaaS platform, but also as a sales channel for tickets in digital format, with the presence of OpenMove branded app for final users, to whom we have also been the evangelist of the service, responsible for communication and customer care.
The province of Trento is an extended area on an interurban scale, consisting of a geographically central capital and more than two hundred small and medium-sized municipalities within a vast and mountainous territory, for a total of 550,000 inhabitants and 5,000,000 unique tourists per year.
Public transport covers multiple transport modes operated by several agencies under public governance. Public transport has very high levels of quality not only with respect to national standards but also with respect to the European average and new technological solutions must therefore live up to high expectations.
The mobility involves different types of users: residents but also a large number of students and tourists, given the vocation of the capital as a University city and of the region as a tourist destination both during the summer and the winter. For this reason the solution must be completely multilingual, with Italian and German spoken by the local population and a good number of foreign languages for tourists.
Mobility is a life-critical service for users who need 24/7 provision and support: starting from this project, in the last five years, this has become the specialty of OpenMove.
The technical solution, that we have completely designed and built internally, is a unified MaaS platform that aggregates 7 transport modes (urban bus, suburban bus, train, cableway, skibus, limited access areas, parking) by 6 different providers (Trentino Trasporti, Trenitalia, APT Campiglio, Hotel Lago di Braies, Province of Trento and Province of Bolzano).
OpenMove solution allows to purchase digital tickets of all these transport services – even combined with each other – with a single touch, processing all the tariff options and guaranteeing the best to the user. Thanks to single sign-on authentication, it also allows students of the University of Trento and tourists in possession of the Guest Card issued by the regional marketing agency Trentino Marketing, to obtain their seasonal ticket in digital format on their smartphone.
Thanks to the Tyrol–South Tyrol–Trentino Euroregion, we performed the integration to allow students from the three provinces to travel seamlessly with OpenMove app, one of the first examples of cross-border mobility in Europe. For this project, we provide our services with a SaaS approach, ensuring very low costs for the Public Administration and a great impact on users who can always benefit from state-of-the-art technologies.
To implement the project we used four elements of our Suite: OpenMove WAY, OpenMove ATLAS and OpenMove ACT as frontend solutions and OpenMove NUCLEUS as a backend platform.
It was necessary to perform integrations with various technical suppliers such as:
- Trentino Digitale for the communication of sold and validated tickets and seasonal tickets of public transport, for decoding the code read during QR Code or NFC validation phase;
- University of Trento for the activation of the annual seasonal ticket of University students and for the recovery of the photos to be displayed together with the seasonal ticket;
- Trentino Marketing for the activation of Trentino Guest Cards, enabling OAuth authentication of OpenMove system with the management system of Trentino Marketing.
Given that our headquarters is located in this territory, the MaaS in Trentino represents for OpenMove a project to be followed with particular attention, where we can constantly experience new developments and where we can learn better following the principles of User Centered Design, from the perspective of a real Living Lab: Special care has been taken in the creation of the app for users, under OpenMove brand, and in the continuous evolution that sees the progressive integration of multiple transport services, with the opening of the platform to new forms of mobility of the future (for example micromobility or autonomous driving services), and new functionalities, such as trip planning, timetables and transport service updates.
Thanks to OpenMove, the province of Trento is now a real MaaS Valley, with an integrated multimodal mobility system for citizens, students and tourists that places Trento in the top 10 of the smartest cities in the world, according to IEEE.
The usage metrics attest a great success:
- 5 years of operation
- 2.5M trips made per year
- 10% of the residents registered to OpenMove
- 15% of Trento city tickets sold by OpenMove
These numbers make the project of OpenMove in province of Trento the first suburban MaaS deployment in Europe.
The advantages of using mobile ticketing, compared to the traditional ticket and smartcard alternatives, have been acknowledged by the Autonomous Province of Trento for its significant savings in material costs and distribution costs. Benefits are tangible for local transport agencies, since the app allows users to be reached without distribution costs and allows to relieve the work of ticket offices and resales, through the autonomous retrieval of information. The app also allows to communicate with users in real time without language or currency barriers.
Users can benefit from an additional sales channel aligned with the times and from the improved access to public transport: the retention rate is over 90%. Digital helps to break barriers in particular for tourists, solving language and currency issues.