The final conference took place on 31 March in Brussels, a month before the official end of the MOMENTUM project. the event was opened by the project coordinator Irene Blázquez Jiménez in the presence of Torsten Klimke, Head of Unit of DG MOVE/B3 – Innovation and Research, and around 50 physical attendees and 20 online participants. After some welcoming words by Klimke, MOMENTUM was put in the wider scope of technological innovation and transport planning in urban mobility, thanks to an inspiring keynote of Philippe Crist (International Transport Forum).

The conference, which was held at BluePoint in Brussels, aimed to set the stage for all project partners. All representatives from the four MOMENTUM cities of Leuven, Madrid, Regensburg, and Thessaloniki presented their road towards the successful implementation of measures. Taking the opportunity of a physical event after two years under the influence of the pandemic, panel debates were organised to allow exchange in a relaxed setting.

 

For several cities MOMENTUM was a great starting point to explore the potentials of transport modelling to plan the deployment of emerging mobility solutions. Whether the focus was on an autonomous people mover (Regensburg), the integration of shared mobility solutions into an existing public transport infrastructure (Madrid), the setup of a new traffic circulation plan (Leuven), or the local test of the MOMENTUM decision support tool (Thessaloniki), all cities had stories about challenges and successes to tell.

After a lunch break that offered opportunities to network, the decision support tool was presented by CERTH/HIT. The tool, which allows cities to take first steps in transport modelling, unrelated to available datasets, is one of the key outputs of this EU-funded project. The audience was delighted to hear that the decision support tool (DST) will remain online and freely accessible for several years on the homepage of https://momentum.imet.gr/.

The programme remained technical with several presentations about data collection, data analysis and processing, as well as a basic insight in the algorithms and plans used to create the DST and other solutions. Thus, the majority of the audience was stunned about the level of detail and insights provided by the technical experts of the MOMENTUM project.

Overall, the event was wrapped up by a political panel debate with MOMENTUM partner organisations that represent the European level of the project. Besides the keynote speaker Philippe Crist, representatives from POLIS, UITP, Nommon, TML and EMT discussed about the future of emerging mobility solutions in the greater framework of urban mobility.