The Potential of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Future Transport Systems
An aspect of collaborative projects is that they start slowly, and as they become effective and productive, they reached their end! The COST Energic (European Network for Research into Geographic Information Crowdsourcing) led to many useful activities, with some of them leading to academic papers. From COST Energic, we’ve got the European Handbook on Crowdsourced Geographic Information, a paper on VGI quality assessment methods, and more.
One outcome came out from the close collaboration around the summer schools that were organised by the network. Prof Cristina Capineri was the chair of the COST network, and also the organiser of summer schools in Fiesole, near Florence. Prof Maria Attard organised the other summer school of the action, at the University of Malta. Based on our close working relationships (though Maria and I know each other since our PhD studies in CASA) we started working on a joint paper. Maria specialises in transport geography, so the support from COST Energic was a reason to consider how VGI will play out in future transport systems. The paper was published in the journal Urban Planning and the abstract reads:
“As transport systems are pushed to the limits in many cities, governments have tried to resolve problems of traffic and congestion by increasing capacity. Miller (2013) contends the need to identify new capabilities (instead of capacity) of the transport infrastructure in order to increase efficiency without extending the physical infrastructure. Kenyon and Lyons (2003) identified integrated traveller information as a facilitator for better transport decisions. Today, with further developments in the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and a greater disposition by the public to provide volunteered geographic information (VGI), the potential of information is not only integrated across modes but also user-generated, real-time and available on smartphones anywhere. This geographic information plays today an important role in sectors such as politics, businesses and entertainment, and presumably this would extend to transport in revealing people’s preferences for mobility and therefore be useful for decision-making. The widespread availability of networks and smartphones offer new opportunities supported by apps and crowdsourcing through social media such as the successful traffic and navigation app Waze, car sharing programmes such as Zipcar, and ride sharing systems such as Uber. This study aims to develop insights into the potential of governments to use voluntary (crowdsourced) geographic information effectively to achieve sustainable mobility. A review of the literature and existing technology informs this article. Further research into this area is identified and presented at the end of the paper.”
The paper is open, and can be found here
