Improving bicycle mobility in urban areas through ITS technologies: The SaveMyBike project

This paper describes some ITS solutions and rewarding policies to increase the use of sustainable transport means in urban areas. Firstly, existing policies are described, and the advantages of rewarding systems are presented. Afterwards, the ITS technologies application to monitor mobility modes is described. In this context, the paper presents the SaveMyBike prototypical project and its solutions. SaveMyBike is an anti-theft monitoring system, based on RFID technologies and made of three modules. The first module creates secure urban areas through installed alarms where owners can leave their bike safely. The second module uses fixed RFID gates to monitor journeys and detect stolen bikes. The third module uses portable RFID readers that, during the parking and street control, read in-bike tags, detecting: the stolen bikes, and origins/destinations of bicycle trips. The system is based on rewarding policies, to incentivize people to use their private bikes and public transport modes.