On the Go

Celebrating the first year of world's largest Mobility as a Service in Berlin, Jakob Michael Heider, Head of Jelbi, and Sebastian Wolf, Product Owner at BVG, share their insights and recommendations for cities looking to launch an alternative to private cars.

We're continuing our second season with Fabien Sauthier, Chief Operating Officer of MOTIONTAG - mobility company that infers insights from smartphone sensors about when, where, how, and why people use transport services. Together we give you insights into: How and which mobility data is used to create digital twins that help shape urban planning? Similar mobility data is relied upon for tracking COVID-19 contacts – is it safe? European Commissioner for Competition has concerns with how Silicon Valley is approaching mobility tracking. Can we secure our movement data from huge multinational companies as well as nascent authoritarian regimes? Will public transportation survive physical distancing? How can new tech help with new features: real-time departures, crowdedness, disruption information? Finally, can incentives nudge people towards sustainable mobility? Listen to our newest episode right now, and don’t forget to subscribe to On the Go on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. You can also find all of our previous episodes on podcast.trafi.com. Please send us your questions, comments, requests to podcast@trafi.com. See you in two weeks!

We kick off our season with Anthony Barba, publisher of newsletter This Week in Mobility. Today we give you insights into: Did COVID–19 cause challenges to shared mobility, or did it just accelerate those same trends that were hiding in plain sight? Cities are hyper-focused on increasing mobility subsidies, as well as passenger and driver safety. Is it at all possible everywhere? Did Intel just tell the world they want to beat Google and Uber? Chip producer just bought Moovit for a staggering amount — 900 million USD.  A significant change in MaaS Global (Whim) leadership: does it spell out the end for Helsinki-based Mobility as a Service company’s vision?  Finally, Uber just dumped a beloved brand — JUMP — and invested 170 million USD into Lime. Did they just future-buy a discounted electric scooter from a garage sale? Listen to our newest episode right now, and don’t forget to subscribe to On the Go on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or Anchor. You can also find all of our previous episodes on podcast.trafi.com. Please send us your questions, comments, requests to podcast@trafi.com. See you in two weeks!

Sophie Seiwald is heading Mercedes-Benz.io as Managing Director and CEO since the beginning of 2018. Before joining Mercedes-Benz.io, Sophie was building up the Digital Hub for the Daimler Financial Services Division in Singapore. Prior to that, she was busy making sure that one of the largest Mercedes-Benz Car Production Plants in the world was built in Beijing. Born and raised in Austria, she currently lives in Stuttgart and commutes between the valley and Berlin. Striving to make Daimler the digital champion of the automotive industry, she’s an advocate for hiring a diverse set of talents from both the creative and technology industry. Being an avid spokesperson for holacracy, Sophie is redefining how cars are sold and how to be a leader. Tune in to meet one of the frontrunners of our digital age.

Anja Hendel is the Director of Porsche’s Digital Lab, a role that she has been happy to explore for the last 1,5 years. Before that, she was also working at Porsche as Director of Innovation and Digital Transformation Finance and in total, she’s spent approximately seven years at the company. Besides being a breath of fresh air in the automotive industry, Anja has held leading positions both at Celeris and Capgemini. As Director of the Digital Lab, her work is driven by innovation and next-level engineering. Today, we’ll figure out what that actually means and what the Lab is working on at the moment. This episode is all about new tech shaping mobility, and no one is better suited than Anja to guide us through it.

Dr. Henrik Haenecke has been a member of Berlin’s public transportation agency BVG's Management Board since August 2016, being mainly in charge of finances and digitalization. In this episode of On the Go, we’ll find out how Henrik is working to shift BVG from a traditional public transit company to an innovative mobility platform - with a little help from Trafi! In February 2019, BVG and Trafi announced a new partnership to create a multimodal app covering all types of transportation in Berlin, Jelbi. The idea is simple: one place to access every mode of mobility in the city, from planning to payment. We also discuss the importance of combining the core function of public transport with new modes of mobility, the power of branding, and how autonomous vehicles will impact urban transportation.

Alex Zosel is the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Advisor at Volocopter, the world's first autonomous air taxi. Volocopter is the global leader in electrical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL), or air taxis to make it a little easier. As early as 2011, the same year as the company was founded, Volocopter earned a safe entry into the history of aviation through manning the world’s first purely electrical multi-copter flight. Since then there’s been rapid progress forward. Tune in to hear about the latest inner city flight tests in Singapore scheduled for later this year, how cities can integrate air taxis into their transportation network and when we will be able to book a Volocopter - at the same cost as taking a cab.

Eckart Diepenhorst is the CEO of FREE NOW and a mobility strategist extraordinaire. FREE NOW was founded in Hamburg in 2009 as mytaxi, and the app has undergone a phenomenal journey in the last few years. With more than 10 million customers across 100 cities, they are a force to reckon with. Together with Ecki, we talk about the quest for even more aggressive growth, combining traditional transport with new multimodal options and the secret sauce behind their successful public affairs strategy.

Jimmy Cliff is the General Manager at Mobike, one of the largest bike-sharing companies in the world. Originally from China, the orange bikes flooded Europe in the course of just one year. This is partly thanks to Jimmy, who's been leading a big chunk of the international expansion. In this episode, you'll get a sneak peek behind Mobike's first year of operations in Europe, how we can make mobility more inclusive as an industry and why we need to involve more women in the decision making process.

Florian Lennert, Director of Intelligent City Forum, helps us to dive into the sphere of mobility and research. We discuss the sustainable urban design and what we can learn from city planning from the 19th and 20th Centuries. Looking into new modes of transport, we step away from the car as our go-to type of vehicle and explore the possibilities of air mobility.

This time we're talking to Stephan Leppler, CEO at MotionTag. Stephan leads a company that strives to create seamless, sustainable, and smart mobility by advocating a switch from supply-based to user-centered transport. Together we outline how generating mobility intelligence can make both cities and providers smarter, as well as pinpointing what public affairs can do to foster - and welcome - innovation.

Today we are talking with Dr. Michael Halbherr, formerly CEO of HERE Technologies, now a Member of the Board at Zurich Insurance, investor, senior advisor, and Chairman of the Board at Trafi. Together we are outlining a few key trends pushing the mobility industry – and society – forward. Michael glances into the future, suggesting an ecosystem that benefits transport providers, cities, and consumers alike.