Build / Mobile development

SNA

Name: icapps
Price range: $

“Slim naar Antwerpen” is an initiative from the city of Antwerp. Their goal is to keep the city accessible to everyone and leave the car out of the city as much as possible. Therefore they make use of studies, user surveys, and different available data. By providing the right tools, they want to give every inhabitant, visitor,... an easy and straightforward overview of the city's smartest transportation options.

Services

Mobile development

Tech

React Native

The issue

The city of Antwerp wants to give visitors, inhabitants,... the option to explore other ways of entering the city center than by car. In 2017, many road works were planned, and this was the city’s queue to do something about the traffic jam. They set up a plan to work toward a 50/50 division between cars and other means of transport. To realize their goals, they set up a digital product, an application that navigates you through the city and suggests the ideal transportation method for their travel. By ideal, they mean smart, fast, and green.

What we did

The application was set up in 2017 but was in need of some updates. Together with SNA, Digipolis, and other parties, we set up the new and improved version of the application. Thanks to new features like the route planner and the mobility map, the user has an even better overview of the traffic in the city. That way, choosing the smartest transportation way becomes child’s play.

For everyone who moves within the city.

The primary target audience for SNA is the employed population entering the city every weekday during rush hour. They benefit most from finding alternative transportation modes to avoid frustrations in the morning chaos. But we also want to reach the inhabitants of the city. If they want to go to a bar in the evening, they can chart their way via the SNA route planner. And let’s not forget about international visitors, maybe a park&ride out of the city center is a more pleasant solution for them than paying parking tickets for the duration of their stay.

The fact that we created a custom navigation tool for the city of Antwerp, the city we work in, and the city I live in, makes me really proud. We built the Waze or Google maps of Antwerp, sounds cool, right?

Sam Van Hoey Front-end Developer at icapps

Juggling technicalities & maps.

SNA is a project in which a lot of different parties are involved. For one, we have the city of Antwerp as an important stakeholder, but also, on the technical side, different parties were involved in setting up the application. We were responsible for the front end of the app. Since the back end was built by another team, we had to work together to realize this project closely. It is almost inevitable to stumble upon some hiccups along the way, but we always find a fitting solution.

For example, we integrated Mapbox for the first time. After a couple of tries, we found out that the Mapbox version we use in react native has to be the same as the native implementation we added for the new navigation feature. This meant we had to use an earlier version of Mapbox than the version we started with, which added its own struggles like lack of documentation and missing features. We learned a lot from this integration and could already use it for other projects.

It’s nice to see your product being used by anybody on the streets. It’s a product that really adds value to daily life.

Helena Standaert Full stack Developer at icapps

A change in behavior.

SNA notices that a lot of people are stuck in their habits. Taking their car to work while they curse the traffic jam on a daily basis, but not thinking about alternatives. That’s what SNA wants to change with the introduction of a user-friendly digital product that quickly shows what other transportation options exist and how incredibly fast you can be at work or anywhere else if you just think beyond your usual commute. Providing a route planner within the application makes it easy to find and combine the different transportation options along your route. An all-in-one application.

Making transportation smart.

The two biggest features of the app are the route planner and mobility map. With these two functionalities, the city of Antwerp wants to bring together a huge amount of mobility data from the city to an interpretable and usable coherent whole. These data differ from data we receive from the city; think of their emission zone data and data from other providers. We show these data on the mobility map so that the user can find all possibilities within their current area and the route planner. You can find the perfect combination of transportation to navigate smartly through the city.

icapps is a very dynamic, involved, and proactive team. We had some struggles along the way, mainly because of the collaboration between different stakeholders and parties. But icapps is always quick to find a fitting solution to any challenge.

Silke Lamoen Communication consultant at City of Antwerp

Bikes gaining popularity.

Over the ten years, the city’s traffic has been measured, and SNA notices a clear shift toward bikes. Transportation by bike became even more popular than taking the car. This shows that people are thinking more and more about their transportation possibilities, finding and exploring other options. We love this shift, both for the traffic jam frustrations and for moving toward a greener, better city.