The city of Antwerp has expanded its route planner ‘Smart Ways to Antwerp' in collaboration with mobility company Be-Mobile and some other stakeholders. Users can discover a lot of new transport possibilities and combinations. Cab rides and various shared vehicles can now also be seen in the route advice.

New route options

The multimodal route planner - on the website and in the app - of Smart to Antwerp allows you to plan your trips to and in the city accurately. The application already considers various transport options and combinations. It indicates which means of transport - or combinations of bicycle and public transport, for example - you can use to get around most efficiently.

Since this week the options have been expanded and cab rides and shared mobility have been added. In this way you get an even more complete overview of all transport options in the city. Specifically, the offers of Blue-bike (bicycles), Poppy (e-steps, e-scooters and cars), Bird (e-steps) and Cambio (cars) are included in the routing results. For Poppy and Bird, the routes are based on the real-time availability of the vehicles. For Blue-bike and Cambio, the routes are based on the locations where the vehicles can be rented. In addition, if known, the route planner immediately shows the battery level of the scooter or car. The average cost of the routes is also shown.

Increasing ease of use

"If you need to go somewhere today and you think about how you would do it, for many people the car parked outside the door is still often the easiest solution," says Alderman for Mobility, Koen Kennis (N-VA). "But we all know that there can be traffic jams on the way and that finding parking is not always easy. Then comes the question: how can I get around in a different way? What are the options? And what's the easiest? It gets complicated quickly because there are a lot of options nowadays." By bringing all the possibilities together in one route planner, the city of Antwerp wants to increase the ease of use and they hope to motivate people to move in a smarter way.

"Not all providers are connected to the route planner yet, such as Lime and Green Mobility, but we are in conversation with them to make that happen as soon as possible," says Kennis. "The next step, in the near future, is that you can also use the route planner as a navigation system."

Digital innovation

Mobility company Be-Mobile developed the multimodal route planner for Smart Ways to Antwerp a few years ago. The route planner is the first in the world to propose a smart combination of all available transport modes and won the Agoria Smart City Award in 2019. The Smart Ways to Antwerp platform is therefore recognized as a best practice in the most prominent European cities.

You can find the route planner on the website of Smart Ways to Antwerp and in the App Store or the Google Play Store.