Vianova Business Explained

In the wake of recent questions, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations, as CEO of Vianova, I intend to stand-up for what I always strived for: purpose, integrity, honesty and transparency, in business as well as in my personal life. Hence I have taken the pencil to restate in black and white What We Do, Why We Do it, and What Customers Pay For.

The Genesis

Vianova was created with the vision to provide public authorities and private organisations with the tools and data to solve the most complex mobility challenges and steer transportation towards full decarbonisation & vision zero. Since the company’s inception, the Cofounders, and the entire Vianova team are convinced that we can achieve safer and more sustainable streets through better data and more informed decisions.

We’ve identified three main problems in the industry:

• Cumbersome access to mobility data, due to licencing (i.e. commercial terms), willingness to share (competition, etc.), or data privacy constraints.
• Lack of tools and algorithms to combine and enrich geographical data-sets and build the insights required for operational planning and decision-making.
• Low distribution of data insights, due to ecosystem silos, lack of clearly articulated use cases, and poor visualisation or consumption means for those insights.

2018 and 2019 were years of great micro-mobility innovation when hundreds of thousands of free-floating devices piled up in European cities. Despite the clear need for transport decarbonisation and more micro-mobility options, it soon became clear that public space, initially designed for cars, was the victim of this success. Cities struggled with how to handle the parking of so many devices on their public realm, and had difficulty successfully integrating them with the existing transport options such as public transport.

What we do

At Vianova, we saw in these challenging times an opportunity to utilise the new connectivity of vehicles to support cities in better integrating micro-mobility into the streets & transport network. Because these devices generate data, they allow for data-informed decision making & real-time management.

In the case of shared-mobility, cities license the Vianova software to access, aggregate and visualise data insights from shared-mobility operators, and eventually all types of vehicles. The use cases vary from infrastructure planning such as cycling lanes & mobility hubs, to parking compliance.

Origin / Destination matrix in Bruxelles

We don’t set policies, and we try to treat both cities and operators fairly and objectively. We thrive to be as independent as we can. We are committed to work with both cities and operators as well as other mobility innovators to shape this nascent industry in the best way possible.

The Vianova software is made of three parts:

• The Data Exchange, allows cities to request access to data feeds from mobility operators, and allows mobility operators to review and accept/decline requests after verifying the identity and use cases of the requestor.
• The Platform aggregates, enriches and transforms raw data-sets into mobility analytics and decision-making insights.
• The Dashboard, a visualisation tool to contextualise insights and ease decision-making.

The Data Exchange was built to facilitate bilateral data sharing without Vianova acting as a switchboard operator, i.e. you don’t need Vianova people to make the plumbing between cities’ requests and operators’ approval, saving time for everyone and improving transparency.

Data Exchange, listing all data requests for operators

Our Business Model

Cities

• Pay on a per vehicle basis for shared-mobility devices under a yearly licence.
• Have the possibility to either trial the platform for 3-month and/or continue on the free plan which only provides limited data & features

Have access to the following features:

• Control: to visualise real-time vehicles locations, operational status, & infractions
• Activity: to visualise metrics and create their own insights based on defined (districts) or custom geographies (public transport stops)
• Regulation: to create geofenced policies and share them with operators
• Reports: to create personalised reports from historical metrics, and download them
• Feeds: to request data feeds from operators and check data quality

Operators

• Do not pay Vianova to share their own data
• Have access to all their data aggregated on behalf of the city (aggregated under the licence of the city) through the Export function (.csv, .geoJSON)
• Have open and free access to all city-created policies through the public URL and/or dashboard (Policy API)
• Have access to the visualisation dashboard for metrics calculated for the licenced client, namely cities.
• Can pay to visualise custom mobility insights (analysis of catchment areas, historical imbalance between app opens & availability of vehicles), and access intelligence such as demand forecast (built using a mix of their data and other sources) — it is a an operator licence for an operator service

The Export function as well as API provide all compliance & aggregated data to operators

FAQ

Does Vianova charge mobility operators to share data ?

It is completely free to share data through the Data Exchange. This means cities can access operators’ data without them having to pay anything for it.

Is the Policy information available to operators without requiring them to pay ?

Yes, the Policy information created by the cities are directly available to operators either through the dashboard or through an open URL which can be shared by cities- see below three examples:

• London
• Stockholm
• Bordeaux

Example: policy information available to operators

Does Vianova utilise data insights without the consent of data providers ?

All data access requests go through the Data Exchange. Hence all data providers, including mobility operators, are notified for all data requests.

Do operators have access to compliance data ?

The whole history of compliance data (the specific infringements of a policy identified by Vianova’s tools, as well as the trend of compliance over time) is available through the open API (https://help.vianova.io/) and through the Export button on the platform.

The Open API portal of Vianova to retrieve all compliance and aggregated data

Is the Dashboard decoupled from the rest of the software?

Yes, it is up to each organisation to use or not the visualisation capability of the dashboard. This is why we have built a very well documented open API suite to facilitate integration for those who would prefer to use their own business intelligence tools — see https://help.vianova.io/

Do operators pay for the dashboard?

Most of the major shared mobility operators are paying clients of Vianova. However this is not to access the data aggregated on behalf of the city. The main reasons operators are paying for Vianova services are:

• Providing some cities with unique data reporting tools on a white label basis, for instance in the case of a single-operator tender
• Utilising the geo-analytics power and visualisation options of the Vianova software to drive their own hyper-local operational decisions

How do operators know how the aggregations get created?

The process for calculating Vianova’s metrics are well documented and follow the best practices of the MDS community.

Does the city have access to personal information, i.e. personally identifiable information (under the definition of GDPR) ?

Certain mobility data could be considered indirect personal data in the context of GDPR, such as vehicle ID together with trip information.

Vianova processes data on behalf of its clients and provides anonymised and aggregated data through the dashboard or API. Therefore cities and transport authorities do not have access to personally identifiable information through Vianova.

How can operators and cities know if an operator API is broken and/or provides wrong vehicle information?

The Vianova Software automatically reports unavailable or broken API from data providers. Cities and Operators have access to the Feed Doctor that notifies them in case of API issues. Data Quality issues can also be linked to operational issues such as vehicle status update in the warehouse or vehicle GPS accuracy (more here).

What is our vision

Steering sustainable mobility with Big Data. We believe we are building the best mobility analytics system on the market at the moment and we have the strongest team to execute the mission we gave ourselves. Hence, we are branching into road safety improvement and curbside management among other mobility intelligence use cases.

Some of the use cases we are currently working on and deriving from the Vianova software:

• Enabling a Swiss city to easily map dangerous zones for Vulnerable Road Users utilising near-misses algorithm and connected vehicles data
• Aggregating telematics data from urban logistic vehicles to provide accurate curbside usage insights to the French capital
• Support the largest UK utility in optimising their EV charging infrastructure planning utilising demand data (i.e. traffic, battery level, etc.) and supply data (existing infrastructure)
• Working with the largest fleet & car-sharing providers to develop mobility hubs in the UK

A Road Safety dashboard to map near-misses between cars and Vulnerable Road Users (VRU)

Reach out

I believe we are doing the right thing and we are doing it in the most transparent way for the industry. However, if you think we can improve in some ways, we would welcome your feedback either to me directly thibault.castagne@vianova.io or to any of the team members.

Thibault Castagne

CEO of Vianova