GOVERNANCE & INTERGRATION
Labour Integration
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEOPLE
While new technologies and mobility policies grab headlines, workers are the driving force behind the urban transport transition. When it comes to human resources for sustainable mobility, it is an if-you-snooze-you-lose situation for cities. POLIS’s Manon Coyne explores how training and employment policies at international and local levels can drive greener and smarter urban mobility
Driver shortage will have consequences on public transport services if the job is not rendered more attractive and workers are not trained © Virrage Images, Shutterstock
From shared transit services to low emissions zones and alternatives fuels, mobile applications are continually emerging. Yet, these new tools, technologies and partnerships, demand new types of jobs, with fresh skills and competencies. So, are cities ready? Are the human resources in place... and what are the repercussions of failing to address these challenges?
What is at stake for cities?
Understanding the nature, speed, and geography of changes in human resources – and responding accordingly – will be a major challenge for the entire urban mobility sector, including local authorities.
Mobility management involves a range of stakeholders: unlike 20 years ago, when it was just city authorities, the new mobility services are now popping up, prompting the need to work with a range of private partners
- Ludovic Leclercq, Research Director at Université Gustave Eiffel and
head of the LICIT laboratory who spoke at a recent joint POLIS-BUas workshop on Human Resources.
Securing the skills: Human resources for traffic management
Jointly organised by POLIS and the Breda University of applied science, the meeting on 'Human Resources for Traffic Management' explored which skills and competencies cities, regions and industry partners will need to achieve sustainable mobility goals- and how academia can support them. Questions and answers animated the discussion with experts from the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas – CERTH, Amsterdam, and Gustav Eiffel University.
Collaboration both within and between cities, as well as between local authorities and industry partners will be critical in order to address the economic, political, and social implications of employment shifts.
What we, as cities, are doing, is a dialogue between stakeholders
- Vincent Lau from the Traffic Management Department of the city of Amsterdam.
A similar story is playing out across urban freight, a sector which has been transformed over the last several years.
Jobs are continually being created, but it requires careful consideration about how we reorganise our activities,
- Susana Val, the Director of the Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC), speaking on a recent POLIS panel.
The pandemic has uprooted and revolutionised logistics: this is the moment to start thinking about what this means for human resources and how we engage all stakeholders across the industry in this conversation.
Citizens and workers participation is key to ensure the adoption of measures really facilitating jobs transition © Day of Victory Studio, Shutterstock
Advancing Automation
Automation is one of the most pressing concerns – for cities and transport workers. There has been widespread apprehension of the repercussions of automation. As bus and train networks begin to trial and implement driverless vehicles, and drone technologies threaten to transform freight, confronting the impact on the labour market is a task local authorities must already embark on. Yet, transformation does not necessarily mean loss of jobs. While some functions will undoubtedly change and some disappear, accurate and effective reskilling can ensure the labour market moves with technological shifts – not against them. Indeed, many cities are effectively reskilling employees rather than displacing individuals. In Italy, the ATM Group (Azienda Trasporti Milanesi) operates an automated driverless metro and has decided to locate stewards along the line with customer service tasks and aid recovery systems in case of incidents. At TMB Barcelona, the automated metro personnel are focused on customer services and system availability: the “Operation Technicians” have a high degree of technical knowledge. Meanwhile, the Drive2the future project, funded by the EU, develops training for drivers of partially and fully autonomous vehicles (cars, buses, trucks), based on defined drivers’ profiles and behavioural models. They deliver content for public transport authorities to prepare their current workers to the coming mobility modes.
Drive2theFuture Project
Commencing in May 2019, Drive2theFuture is an EU-funded project that aims to prepare “drivers”, travellers and vehicle operators of the future to accept and use connected, cooperative and automated transport modes and the industry of these technologies to understand and meet their needs and wants.
Going Digital
As cities and regions seek to develop smart mobility systems catered towards users’ demands, data collection, analysis and processing are becoming instrumental and highly sought-after skills.
Data, digital and programming skills will be fundamental requirements,
- Josep Maria, who leads the Data analysis and Modelling Laboratory supporting the Thessaloniki Smart Mobility Living Lab and spoke on the POLIS-BUas panel.
Within this frame, Madrid has developed a comprehensive concept for “Metro Stations 4.0”: customer service staff, equipped with tablets and mobile phones, moves around instead of sitting in ticket offices (that no longer exist in the new stations). At the same time, Brussels is reviewing its taxi driver regulation to improve complementarity with public transport, taxi user satisfaction, and drivers’ social protection in a growing platform economy.
Not so easy
Achieving a data-enabled workforce is a complex task and requires extensive and ongoing training and development.
People can be educated, they will need to acquire some new skills, but adaptation is possible
- Vincent Lau.
The Amsterdam Traffic Management Department investigates future requirements for mobility management in cities. They consider new services they have just started using, new tools emerging, and new profiles required. They recognize the struggle to find people educated in the way that will be needed as one of the major challenges. Similarly, the Province Noord Brabant, on its side, provides on-job trainings to their employees. They have established a partnership with the JADS training institute to benefit from the data and digitalisation knowledge incorporated in their courses.
Twan Elbers, from the Province’s Mobility, Data, and Information Management Unit, explains:
All-in all, data and digitalisation are upcoming and current topics in which we need to update the skills of the organisations and our employees.
The Big Divide
Vincent Lau says
People that coordinate with all the different departments, making sure that urban mobility turns into a cohesive whole – that is the mobility centre of the future.
Amsterdam noticed that, if data science skills are key for future mobility workers, IT knows nothing of how traffic operates. There is a big divide between IT and traditional workers, and bridging this gap is one of the major challenges for urban mobility management in the future.
We need partnership with universities, and people with an affinity for networking and communication
he concluded.
Gathering knowledge
Despite the numerous actions that local authorities have already undertaken, the coming transition of the transport workforce remains under-researched – this needs to change, starting with analysing the plethora of studies investigating the needs, opportunities, and potential pitfalls conducted at EU level, which provide a certain number of guidelines for cities and regions to facilitate the transition and inspire further local research. In France, for example, the UTP Prospective Study on the evolution of jobs, professions and skills in urban transport informs on the recent trends in public transport employment, legislation, and technological evolutions to give projected staffing requirements until 2026. If drivers represented 65% of public transport workers in 2016, the figure should decrease to 59% in 2026. This is related to the high number of retiring drivers between 2018 and 2026. The CAD study ordered by the European Commission in 2020 includes figures on the expected number of jobs per sector in 2035 and 2050 (passenger, freight, manufacturing), the expected transition to automated transport in passenger transport services until 2050, and job categories and task evolutions until 2050.
UITP-ETF report on Digital transformation and social dialogue in urban public transport in Europe
The European Social Partners in urban public transport, UITP and ETF, identified the digital transformation in Urban Public Transport as an emerging topic for the social dialogue already some years ago within the European Social Dialogue Work Program and decided to carry out a joint project called “Digital transformation and social dialogue in Urban Public Transport in Europe”. This report summarises results of a study that was elaborated to support the joint project of UITP and ETF that started in February 2019.
Action!
Cities and regions are already anticipating the impending challenges of the labour market, turning obstacles into opportunities.
This is not the future, this is today, and new skills will become the standard
- Josep Maria from CERTH.