Improving West Harbour - Old City Harbour mobility flows with smart solutions

The ferry connection between Helsinki West Harbour and Tallinn Old City Harbour is one of the busiest in the world with over 8 million annual passengers. Current traffic creates substantial congestion, noise and other negative externalities at both ports and in both cities.
 
FinEst Smart Mobility piloted five ICT solutions in the harbours and adjacent areas, to find solutions for these challenges. The pilots focused on better integration of different transport modes in inner-city and cross-border traffic.
 
The main results of the project:

• Harbour’s PSO by Infotripla is a real-time information system to monitor traffic in the Helsinki West harbour. The system recommends routes for outbound traffic and sends alerts to the traffic management officials. After project completion, Infotripla has become part of Jätkänsaari Mobility Lab in Helsinki – a large-scale umbrella project where smart mobility solutions are tested and scaled up for further use.
• FinEst API by Fleetrange is an automated and real-time schedule tracking of ship traffic between Helsinki West Terminal and Tallinn Old City Harbour. The FinEst API combines data from various public open data sources such as the ship’s automatic tracking system data, schedules, ship parameters, historical tracking data and weather observations to provide real-time data about the ship’s departure and arrival.
• FinEst Mobility by GoSwift is an application targeted towards truck drivers; It sends notifications about the exact time, when to drive to the ferry terminal gates and thus, reduces waiting at the port gates in the harbour.  Logistic companies responsible for the trucks in the ferries and Tallink lines have made the platform available for their drivers.
• The Kyyti app developed by Kyyti Group app aimed to decrease the use of private cars between West Harbour and Vantaa Airport by offering an affordable shared taxi service and public transport route information together with ticket sales. Kyyti combined public transport in the city, intercity buses, car rental & sharing, trains and payments and ticketing under one roof. Despite positive response from involved parties, demand for such service was low.

The project results are well-summarised in these short videos: 

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVM9vpfFvbA and 
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAOGcFtxz3c

Most of the partners in the project used an innovation procurement method. This means that firstly, a procurement was made to gather ideas about smart mobility solutions and mini-pilots were carried out with the selected ideas. Secondly, the results of the mini-pilots were validated, and new ideas were gathered. As a result, 6 pilot ideas were chosen to develop and test the smart and innovative solutions to relieve the traffic load around the harbours.
 
Cooperation of stakeholders also brought some results which were not initially planned in the application but are very valuable outcomes:

• In terms of public transport, the project enabled the integration of the Finnish Digitransit service into the Estonian peatus.ee service and thus, directly improving travel chain planning over the sea in near future
• During the project, a possibility to purchase tickets for the Helsinki region public transport from Tallink and Eckerö Lines ferries was created, additionally to the planned results. This helps improve e.g. work-related commute.