This project has received funding from the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency under grant agreement No 776381
The Galileo 4 Mobility project is happy to announce that the MaaS aggregator pilot in Barcelona has been completed. During the pilot, project partner RACC tested how Galileo technology improved the accuracy of the services in its app CityTrips (previously called RACC Trips). Data analysis is still ongoing but some preliminary results have been already disclosed by Marti Massot, Mobility and ITS Project Manager at RACC.
Can you give us a quick introduction into the CityTrips app?
CityTrips is an application that gathers the mobility offer of Barcelona, Madrid and other big cities in Spain. In the app, bike sharing, moto-sharing, car-sharing, public transport and taxi are gathered into one single application. The main objective of CityTrips is to offer a multimodal door-to-door experience that is as seamless as possible.
What was the purpose of the pilot?
Correct positioning of services is at the base of CityTrips. Therefore, the pilot consisted of testing how Galileo technology would improve the accuracy of the geolocation signal: The overall goal is indeed enabling the fastest and smoothest transition between modes.
How was the pilot set-up?
First, to recruit the users that would participate in the pilot, RACC sent push messages through the application to all users. In total, 15 participants were selected.
The pilot had two phases: in the first one, participants would use CityTrips with a smartphone not equipped with Galileo technology – in the second phase, they were given a smartphone with Galileo technology. Doing this, we could analyse what impact the satellite technology had from a user point of view. The operational part of the pilot started at the beginning of May 2019 and was completed late July 2019.
During the pilot, we met with the participants twice: once to brief them, the other time to hand them the smartphones (which you can see on the picture).
For the pilot, we asked the participants to take note of their experience while using the app, which they did via voice messages. In total we received over 100 voice messages, in which participants provided feedback on their experience when using CityTrips.
Can you provide us with some first results?
We see that the precision and the acquisition time of the geolocation signal improves when using the Galileo-equipped smartphone. To be exact, it improved by almost 1 point (from a qualitative scale from 0 to 5). Further conclusions are still to come, as we are still analysing the results. So.. stay tuned!