City of Cascais deploys Pick for Urban Mobility

  • November 8, 2021
  • William Payne

The Portuguese City of Cascais has integrated Ubirider’s Pick Platform into the city’s mobility app MobiCascais to provide enhanced services and improved mobility to the city’s more than 214,000 residents.  

Through MobiCascais, residents of Cascais already have access to free public transportation within the city. With the addition of the Pick Platform, the MobiCascais app will enable residents to book tickets for all forms of public transportation, find and pay for the most convenient parking space, find points of interest and much more.  Pick also provides the ability to sell tickets to museums and other attractions through MobiCascais, using mobility as a means to suggest various activities nearby, ultimately making it simpler to enjoy life. The system also allows Cascais residents to use the MobiCascais app to plan and book trips on public transportation throughout the country of Portugal and anywhere in the world.  

Starting in December, the users of MobiCascais will be able to rent bicycles or scooters, charge electric vehicles and call a taxi. MobiCascais users will also have the ability to see their carbon footprint based on the transportation chosen, earning “CityPoints” and “Cashcais,” the city’s virtual coin, as a reward for more sustainable choices. 

The City of Cascais will integrate the Pick Insight web interface, which collects anonymized information from travellers’ smartphones, enabling transit operators to benefit from a new, independent and transparent channel to manage ridership and fare collection in real time, without additional infrastructure.

“The collaboration between Cascais and Ubirider is an excellent example of how an entity in the public sector and a private company like Ubirider can work and innovate together in a way that is trustworthy, open and forward-thinking,” said Marco Espinheira, Head of Future for Cascais. “Cascais is a worldwide case study and a frontrunner regarding the adoption of digital solutions and mobility policy, so we must partner with the best in order to keep up the pace of innovation. We decided to work together at the end of July and the app was deployed at the end of September — a very tight period for such a complex project. We are especially proud to be working with a Portuguese company. We know that Portugal has some of the best innovative and entrepreneurial minds in the world, and Ubirider proved to be able to deliver the best, most comprehensive solution to meet our needs.”

Pick is designed to perform as an independent platform to connect and help both travellers and transport operators provide improved travel experiences. The mobile app Pick Hub by Ubirider, available through the Apple App Store and Google Play, allows users to plan door-to-door travel, pay and ride to all destinations, everywhere, using the best transport combination. Through Pick, the MobiCascais app is integrated with the monthly transit pass systems for the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon, which includes 18 municipalities. According to Ubirider, this makes Pick Hub the only mobile app in the region that enables users to buy and recharge physical passes directly through the app and using their smartphones’ NFC.

“We deliberately designed Pick to be flexible for any kind of application or integration,” said Paulo Ferreira dos Santos, CEO and founder of Ubirider. “Each municipality and transport operator has different challenges they are looking to solve: aiming to increase ridership, improve travel experience or simplify fare collection — it’s never one size fits all. Pick allows operators and cities to autonomously and efficiently manage their operations and specificities. At the same time, having a system that connects various municipalities and transportation systems creates a seamless, enjoyable experience for the rider. Efficient travel is about helping people to easily plan and pay for the journey, and arrive on time and relaxed to the destination. Offering value to both providers and riders is where Pick is different from all other solutions on the market.”

“Our focus is improving transportation — to not only make the transportation experience significantly better, more integrated and simpler for individuals but to also empower cities, municipalities and transit operators to gain valuable insights into travel trends that will enable them to be nimble enough to readjust their networks to satisfy citizens’ and business’ needs, all while being more sustainable,” said Santos. “It is exciting for us to work with innovative entities such as the City of Cascais that aim to explore the power of digital technologies to offer residents and millions of visitors the most seamless experience. We are confident that the Pick Platform is the disruptive solution the market is looking for to smartly integrate multiple transport modes and connect cities, citizens and transport operators to dramatically improve the travelling experience everywhere.”