By Elena Lipchenko
VP of business development
These days every new smartphone application is fighting for the user’s attention, but users are getting tired and overwhelmed with the continuous need for more and more single purpose apps. The more customer demand one app can cover, the better value the user receives.
City Access is a smartphone app designed by PayiQ that brings several valuable services to the fingertips of a citizen at once. The application is built on the backbone of PayiQ’s existing transport app which can be seen and experienced for example in Turku where half of the city’s population uses the Föli app.
Reducing traffic emissions is one of the core goals of many cities. With pressing environmental issues and air quality concerns, cities wish to provide a more pleasant and sustainable living environment for their citizens.
The CITY Access app, or CITY Acc for short, was designed to tackle these issues. It is a solution for cities that wish to reduce their carbon footprint, communicate with their citizens effectively and engage them in the sustainable development of their environment.
Ideally CITY Acc will provide citizens with topical transport, service, and event information on the go, and encourage them to make sustainable choices in their daily life.
The app can offer information on, for example, events going on nearby if the user has enabled geolocation. The user could easily find museum exhibitions, Christmas markets, concerts and sports games going on or about to start near them. This way the app also acts as a marketplace for local businesses to improve their visibility towards citizens and visitors.
Comprehensive sustainability and movement analytics
CITY Acc offers the city a complete outlook on its citizens’ transport usage and sustainable development. At the same time as the app serves the citizens and visitors, it also collects data on how people use the city’s amenities, spaces, and transportation.
The app equips the city with a sharp set of big data analytics on movement, transport usage and travel behavior of their citizens. This will help the city to make fact-based decisions on more efficient routing and the capacity of public transport.
The app aggregates data on heat-maps of travelers, origin and destination points and average durations of trips, all formed with anonymously collected data. A city also has access to CO2 calculations and analytics that can be used as a basis for sustainable decision making.
The users can send real-time feedback inside the app; be it a full trash can or a broken bench, the user can report it with pictures and the information will be sent directly to the responsible department.
Gamified and digitized daily climate actions
Easy to install and one-time log-in to reach public transport, local events and businesses – this is something that a city dweller today wishes for in the flood of separate applications, websites and social media feed. The trend is to create more compact solutions that combine different services and actions.
For a city a real-time platform to communicate with citizens, to get their feedback and propositions for improvement, as well as utilize crowd sourcing, is the next step to improve living environment. To encourage citizens to make more sustainable choices daily and on their own initiative is one of the biggest goals cities these days reach for.
We at PayiQ feel that gamifying and digitizing climate actions is a solution to both the citizens’ needs and the city’s goals. In CITY Acc the citizen needs to download, register, and add payment information only once to use the public transport and numerous local services listed on the city’s own CITY Acc application. At the same time, the user is encouraged to make climate friendly choices inside the application by fun gamification features. Everyone needs to get on board with reaching the climate goals and CITY Acc is our contribution.
