Nothing's more vexatious than a traffic jam during your daily commute to Antwerp. Fortunately, there are many smart ways to get around! Together with Stad Antwerpen, we bring you faster, more efficient and environment-friendly commutes. Discover Smart Ways To Antwerp and its plethora of new features now!
Briefing
Large-scale constructions, new vehicle emission standards and continuous expansion of city-wide transportation options... Antwerp has to juggle all these concepts on a daily basis for years to come. As a consequence, encouraging citizens to adopt smart ways of getting around is one of the city's main priorities.
Solution
The predecessor of 'Smart ways to Antwerp' was not optimal, and did not meet the needs of its users. It was time for Little Miss Robot to redesign the entire platform and mobile application, and for us to build it!
Process
Firstly, a website that informs citizens and tourists about the endless mobility options, newest measures and Antwerp’s future plans. Needless to say, every aspect of the platform had to be as smooth as Antwerp’s future mobility system.
On a technical level, we opted for the Angular framework. The website’s data is delivered to the user through a Mapbox-based interface, combined with a SOLR-driven search engine. To provide every desired functionality, the data was enriched through geospacial analysis based on Turf.js functions. Behind-the-scenes, we built a robust backend service that communicates with a plethora of data sources such as ArcGIS, the Velo Antwerp Bike Sharing API, the iRail Belgian railway API and Be Mobile to enable the platform’s full potential.
Aside from the website, we also delivered a mobile solution tackling the same problems, combining all available transportation options to help commuters and tourists easily coordinate their trip to Antwerp. The ‘Smart ways to Antwerp’ app was built on React Native, a trusted framework for building mobile applications for both iOS and Android in a single, individual codebase.
In general, this particular project requires a continuous design and development effort. Together with LMR and Stad Antwerpen, we are constantly striving for improvement. The city’s modal shift plan is ambitious and many more features and improvements are being designed and built as we speak.
