Cubic Transportation Systems: Empowering Smart Cities with Smart Data

Smart transport infrastructure is often recommended as the first stepping stone on the way to becoming a smart city. A smart and efficient transport network can be a significant differentiator, stimulating a city’s productivity and economic growth through reducing congestion, improving road capacity and safety, environmental sustainability, reducing transport disadvantage, and by making travel simpler, more seamless and more enjoyable for citizens. However, as the global population becomes more urbanized, the challenges continue to grow for transportation operators to predict, influence and manage transportation demands within the available infrastructure across multiple transportation modes. This demand can only be addressed by leveraging state-of-the-art technologies like big data and using its far-reaching capabilities to comprehend travel patterns and passenger behavior and equitably distribute traveler loads across both public and private modes of transport.

Against this backdrop, San Diego-based Cubic Transportation Systems is on a mission to improve the quality of citywide travel experiences of commuters across all modes of transportation by harnessing the power of big data. Cubic’s NextCityvision provides a roadmap for a coordinated framework, using legacy and emerging payment methods and information systems to integrate all travel, payment, customer experience, operations and analytic information in the region, for all modes of transport. Underpinning this vision is data. Bringing together real time data gathered across this integrated network from payments, tolling, parking, roads, passenger information, smart city sensors and more, to provide top-notch transportation analytics that enable smart passenger mobility.

As a testament to its expertise in devising transportation solutions, Cubic is the face behind some of the world’s most iconic ticketing systems including the London Oyster card, New South Wale’s Opal Card and the new One Metro New York (OMNY) project.

Additionally, it was the first to enable contactless transport payments using your smart phone, wearable device, credit or debit card, and recently partnered with Apple to deliver virtual public transit cards straight to your apple wallet. Building on its impressive portfolio of innovative solutions, Cubic has become the unanimous choice to analyze such voluminous data sets of commuters and their transport transactions and utilize the synergy of big data and analytics to help cities manage their transportation structures while giving rise to smarter cities. "Being the custodian of mind-boggling amounts of data, we process almost 24 billion transactions per day to analyze different patterns of mobility and reduce traffic congestion and pollution by harnessing the power of big-data," states Murray Wood, Global Head of Analytics at Cubic.

With an unbridled ambition to execute its NextCity vision, Cubic has developed a transportation-oriented, cutting edge, secure, multi-tenant cloud-based solution—Data Management and Analytics Platform (DMAP)—capable of satisfying even the most demanding transportation analytics needs. "We focus on our vision of NextCity, addressing transit challenges on three critical levels: providing seamless traveler experience, tailoring service to demand, and making meaningful transportation policies," states Wood.

As a highly optimized platform for transport agency’s data sets, DMAP can integrate all available transport data including public transport payments, real-time passenger information, transit and maintenance vehicle locations, road congestion, tolling and more. The data is then optimized and aggregated to help deliver efficiencies and cost savings to agencies and a more seamless traveller experience to commuters.

In the fallout of the global pandemic, where ridership has taken a toll, agencies are looking forward to a future where data assets are paving new ways for them to improve the resilience of their services by developing a greater understanding of how, when and where people like to travel. Amid this scenario, Cubic is helping various agencies comprehend the domino effects of traffic congestion on passenger mobility and vice versa by offering real-time, dynamic, data-driven holistic solutions to facilitate smarter travel for passengers in a post-pandemic future.

Envisioning the near future, Cubic is very much governed by their NextCity vision and their passion to make a traveller’s life easier through enabling seamless planning, booking and payment of multi-modal journeys. "We are going to integrate all our offerings including mobility as a service, mobile applications, payments, and traffic management into one massive platform for a hassle-free passenger experience," concludes Wood.