Making your small town a better place to live

Mass public transportation is an expensive operation. It needs to keep running many buses, even when some buses are empty. Hundreds of small towns around the world cannot afford that. The waiting times in those towns are very long when there is any public transportation available at all.

Non-existing public transportation leads to ever-growing towns’ dependence on personal cars which are one of the main contributors of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and traffic congestion. The inefficient bus usage results in more than 1 billion people (specifically low-income residents) having limited social mobility and access to job interviews, jobs, schools, healthcare, and other essential urban amenities. People leave small towns in favor of bigger cities which worsens the de-population trend.

People leave small towns in favor of bigger cities which worsens the de-population trend.

Tunnll is a next-generation mass transportation system for small towns. It relies on the data infrastructure from Digital Innovation Hubs in Sweden (RISE Institutes of Sweden) and Spain (ITI Data Cycle Hub Valencia and Eurecat Technological Center of Catalonia) of the EUHubs4Data project. Powered by a Cyber-Physical System consuming Big Data (Copernicus Sentinel-2 & OpenStreetMap maps) and GNSS real time location data, it is more efficient than fixed timetable bus services and than “flexible” on-demand minibus services.

Thanks to its efficiency, Tunnll is a sustainable solution for small towns with limited or no budgets. At the same time, Tunnll brings absolute car-free mobility to small towns’ residents: with Tunnll any person living in a small town can order a bus with a smartphone, board it 15-30 minutes later and get to any destination in town within 15-30 minutes. Unlike Demand-Responsive Transit (DRT), Tunnll is not a niche small-scale technology – Tunnll can provide mass transit services to all residents in a small town making the town a more attractive place to live.