Description

The problem of accessibility and mobility in our cities is a major societal challenge. Urban planning has not been designed for citizens with reduced mobility.

CONTEXT

Location:

• Angers has been a city of experimentation for more than 20 years. Due to the representativeness of its population, Angers is a city panel on many products and sectors of activity (large distribution, automatic radars).

Location of this challenge: France cities 

 Target community: 

• Public establishments, Persons who are disadvantaged with reduced mobility (PRM) regardless of physical disability
• As described above: "With the economic crisis and budget cuts, cities have increasingly tight budgets; moreover the expenditures to improve accessibility are very important. It is therefore necessary to be able to compensate this economic scarcity with technological innovation to facilitate the daily life of millions of disabled people” 

CHALLENGE

According to the ECMT (European Conference of Ministers of Transport), there are currently over 100 million people with disabilities in Europe, including more than 37 million people with disabilities in the strict sense of the term, with the remaining 63 million being composed of elderly or vulnerable people, pregnant women, people with small children or cumbersome packages. It should not be forgotten that at the world level the elderly represent about 600 million people. 1 out of 10 Europeans is disabled and 1 out of 4 Europeans has a family member with a disability.

The French Equal Opportunities Act of 2005 forecasted that in 2015, 100% of the Establishments will be Public Access Establishments (PRAs). This is far from the case today, as only 30% of the PRAs are declared accessible for disabled people.

In addition to the inaccessible PRAs, obstacles on the road are abundant: a too narrow sidewalk, an unsuitable coating, sloping terrains, a boat that hasn’t a suitable access for disabled persons; as well as temporary obstacles, often linked to incivility, like cars or two-wheelers parked on the sidewalk, jobs without alternative or accessible path. For instance, Paris, the third most visited city in the world is 80% inaccessible.

Moving freely and autonomously in cities is therefore a problem for all people with reduced mobility, whose rights are not respected, facing isolation and no longer wanting to travel for fear of being blocked in an unknown inaccessible place

With the economic crisis and budget cuts, cities have increasingly tight budgets; moreover expenditures to improve accessibility are very important. It is therefore necessary to be able to compensate this economic scarcity with technological innovation to facilitate the daily life of millions of disabled people.

Interactive map solutions on the website have been developed but the format is not suitable for everyday use. Paper maps are not an effective solution over the long term because the material can be easily deteriorated, updated in real time cannot be operated and in addition is not easy to hold them when you are a person with reduced mobility.

Mobile applications allow real-time updates. They are also more easily disseminated to a wider audience.

We are therefore looking for a technological solution that is a mobile application to enable all people with reduced mobility to be able to move around the city in complete autonomy and disposing of a suitable route to the desired destination or accessible place. The solution must be duplicable on a large scale, quickly to cover a large territory, allowing the largest number of people with reduced mobility to benefit from the service.

THE CHALLENGE OWNER 

The challenges for the smart city are numerous. The city of tomorrow is organized around several axes: environmental issues and energy constraints, better collaboration between its citizens, local authorities and operators, the development of user-oriented economic models and the integration of digital technologies in the city.

The accessibility of the city center, its infrastructures, transport and its Public Access Establishments (PRAs) is a problem in direct connection with the societal considerations that the Smart City of tomorrow brings.

Angers has been a panel city for more than 20 years and is the place in France where many products are tested before being distributed on the market, for large retailers in particular.

The PAVIC association (http://pavic.io/), created in Angers, is being involved along the same lines of experimentation on the territory.

The founding members of the association comprise 3 colleges: academic, institutional and business colleges. The association promotes collaborative work, the networking of digital actors, training, as well as exchanges and valorisation of innovative projects that are contributing to the purpose of the association. It relies on technical resources made available to its members and aimed at building the technical and operational platform as well as supporting experiments.

The association therefore combines the agility of a Start-up and the resources of its members to shorten the duration of the experiments and facilitate the placing on the market of products and services that flow from it. Very pragmatic, it capitalizes on a single project manager for each experiment, and capitalizes on the feedback of experiments in order to bring the concrete solutions, essential to the success of the project carried out by the entrepreneur / company.

Commitment

The Association commits on to implementation of the necessary means to achieve these objectives and in particular by facilitating the execution of experiments in order to test the use of products and processes designed by solution providers, ensuring their evaluation by potential users.