With rugged terrain and mobility centered on personal car ownership, bringing together the residents of Okinawa with convenient and eco-friendly transportation is no easy feat.
But sustainable transit is key to both decarbonization and inclusive regional mobility. And now, a new research project, dubbed SO-SMART (a proactive SOcial-based framework for SMART transportation), aims to find sustainable and accessible public transport means through an innovative approach built on citizen participation. To mark the beginning of the project, experts from local municipalities as well as national and international researchers joined residents of the Onna and Ishikawa areas of Okinawa at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) at an ideathon on 5 December 2024.
Rather than creating costly new transportation means, the research sets out to create a modular, interactive platform for optimizing existing means of communal transport, such as providing a unified overview of various public- and shuttle bus schedules, as well as exploring new transportation options using big data, machine learning, and community engagement. SO-SMART is driven by a collaborative approach to conducting research, where residents are involved throughout the entire project, from design to implementation. As Professor Christophe Claramunt from the Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology in France and Visiting Scholar at OIST, who is one of the initiators of the project, describes it: "to create long-term transportation solutions, we must involve local citizens throughout the entire process. They know their communities and their personal needs the best, and integrating their perspectives into the research process can foster innovative design solutions."
In addition to taking the first, small steps towards improving public transportation in the Onna and Ishikawa areas of Okinawa, SO-SMART will serve as a case-study for future projects to create smart transportation systems in the prefecture, across Japan, and internationally. "My hope is that this research design will become a prototype for finding innovative solutions to transportation issues worldwide," envisions Prof. Claramunt.
The ideathon was organized by OIST's Visiting Program. Following talks on mobility challenges in Okinawa, case studies of grassroots efforts to create accessible public transport solutions across Japan, and research into the future of electric vehicles, mixed groups of representatives from local municipalities and from the prefectural government, national and international researchers, local business leaders, and residents were formed to come up with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) transportation solutions. Their discussions were grounded in statistics about the current state of transportation in Okinawa and Japan, as well as in sobering stories of what mobility means in daily life: one Onna resident shared her difficulties of getting her children to school and go to work in an area underserved by public transport and dominated by heavily congested roads.
The group session was buzzing with positive energy - one participant noted how interesting it was to see various stakeholders, like a bus company representative and a researcher, come together, have fun, and brainstorm. Though the research project is at an early stage, the participants were clearly united in their common determination and enthusiasm to set the stage for creating sustainable and accessible mobility.
At the end of the ideathon, the groups presented a wide range of initiatives, from simple yet effective means to improve public transport, over a targeted framework for setting the right metrics for measuring the success of SO-SMART, to identifying citizen needs through an app and encouraging interregional collaboration. Dr. Jonas Fischer, manager of the Visiting Program Section and project lead of SO-SMART at OIST, summarizes the event: "it is exciting to connect international experts with the local Okinawan community, to co-create solutions that contribute to more sustainable and convenient mobility in our area while contributing to global research into smart transport solutions."
SO-SMART is a collaboration between the University of Szeged in Hungary, Karabük University in Türkiye, University of Western Brittany in France, and the Kyoto Institute for Technology (KIT), Nara Institute for Science and Technology (NAIST) and OIST in Japan. It is funded by the European Interest Group (EIG) CONCERT-Japan, a joint initiative to promote and support cooperation in science, technology and innovation between the European region and Japan.
Residents of Onna and Ishikawa can already contribute to the research by submitting feedback on their local transport through a LINE app, available here.
