The EIT Urban Mobility initiative, established by the EU EIT, has announced a number of urban mobility initiatives that will carry through into 2025. The projects address challenges such as accelerating the hydrogen transition, aiding bus manufacturers to comply with the new Vehicle General Safety Regulations (GSR2) regulations and supporting open innovation partnerships.

The projects include hydrogen retrofitting urban buses and diesel trains for use in cities, commuter travel analytics, improving urban road safety by fitting buses with ADAS, tackling urban car dependency, and digital mobility innovations.

The HERO project, led by EVARM, aims to target decarbonisation of urban minibus fleets. This project combines the Metropolitan Transport Authority of Barcelona with EVARM and EKPO Fuel Cell Technologies, and involves organisations in Germany and Spain.

There are multiple zero-emission technologies available for standard buses. But city minibuses face limitations. These vehicles require extended operational hours of up to 18 hours without the possibility of refuelling, a challenge unmet by current battery capacities or hydrogen solutions that require daily electric charging. The project focuses on developing fuel cell retrofit technology for turning existing diesel vehicles into hydrogen-powered, zero-emission vehicles.

Hyiptrain seeks to transform the railway industry by introducing a hydrogen retrofit kit for diesel trains. This project aims to reduce the upfront costs of hydrogen adoption. It is being led by Digas and Mikroluch, and spans Latvia and Ukraine.

The Travalytics project aims to simplify corporate sustainability reporting by automating the collection and analysis of employee travel data. It aims to help companies comply with the new CSRD regulations which will mandate companies with 500+ employees to submit sustainability reports from 2025. It involves Trivector Traffic, Backtick Technologies, Tetrapak, and the Danish Society of Engineers (IDA), and spans Sweden and Denmark.

The ABC project, led by Autonomy Now in collaboration with Sor Libchavy, aims to advance bus safety in urban environments. The project focuses on implementing advanced driver-assistance systems(ADAS) to mitigate risks posed by buses to pedestrians and cyclists due to their size and manoeuvrability limitations, ABC will deliver an out-of-the-box ADAS solution for small and mid-sized city bus original equipment manufacturers (OEM) from countries part of the Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS) preventing their lock-out from the market. The solution will incorporate features like blind spot monitoring, reversing camera view, and driver drowsiness warnings.

The Franco-Spanish EU-Propel project will support collaboration between EIT Urban Mobility and French Innovation Agency for Transport (AIT). The project will bring together three graduate startups from the open innovation programme Propulse and Bax & Company, innovation agency with a large network of EU cities, to tackle car-dependency issues in logistics, commuting, and leisure.

The MoTO project aims to establish a mobility living lab in Turin, focusing on social, shared, and digital mobility innovations. It will build on existing initiatives like “ToMove,” “Torino City Lab (TCL),” and “Casa delle Tecnologie emergenti di Torino (CTE NEXT)”. The project objective is to experiment within Turin’s context to assess feasibility, user value, and commercial potential of the urban mobility solutions proposed by Transcality, Dreamwaves, and Karos Mobility.