A new course for urban mobility management across Europe! The EMERALDS project releases its final Policy Brief, drawing on three years of research and live deployments in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Riga.
Europe, December 2025 - Press Release
After three years of research, real-world pilots, and cross-collaboration, the EMERALDS project - funded under the European Union's Horizon Europe programme - has published its final Policy Brief, setting out a concrete roadmap for how European cities can harness real-time mobility data without compromising citizen privacy or breaking municipal budgets.
Titled Turning Urban Mobility Data into Real-Time Decision Power: Policy Lessons from EMERALDS, the brief arrives at a crucial moment: European cities are struggling with transport complexity, climate obligations under the Green Deal, tightening GDPR and security-related requirements, and the growing expectations of citizens for efficient, sustainable public services.
Read the Policy Brief - Download it and share it
From Research to Reality: Three Years in the Making
Launched under Horizon Europe, EMERALDS set out to address a stubborn paradox in modern city management: urban authorities collect enormous volumes of mobility data, yet rarely possess the tools, expertise, or legal confidence to translate that data into timely, operational decisions.
Over the course of the project, the consortium evolved from prototype development into full operational deployments, embedding AI-driven forecasting models, multimodal traffic dashboards, and edge-computing pipelines directly into the daily workflows of participating municipalities. The journey was not without its challenges but the result is a suite of solutions that are, by design, affordable, replicable and built to outlast the project itself.
The Pilot Cities: Three Urban Laboratories
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The Hague - Predicting the Beach Before It Becomes a Problem
For The Hague, the challenge was seasonal but high-stakes: how to manage the crowd of visitors who descend on Scheveningen Beach during summer weekends and events, straining transport links, emergency services, and public space. EMERALDS deployed short-term (8-hour) and mid-term (10-day) AI forecasting models that fuse live crowd counts, parking data, weather feeds, and event calendars into a single real-time system. Colour-coded risk levels - green through red - were integrated directly into the city's existing digital twin, giving decision-makers an intuitive, at-a-glance view of emerging pressure points.
The system demonstrated that proactive crowd management, rather than reactive crisis response, is achievable and cost-effective.
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Rotterdam - Smarter Traffic Without the Price Tag
Rotterdam's pilot tackled the economic and operational inefficiencies of conventional traffic monitoring. A multimodal traffic performance dashboard, updated every 15 minutes, now provides strategic and tactical oversight across the city's road network. A gradient boosting highway forecasting system further enables the city to predict congestion and travel time degradation before it occurs.
More accurate traffic intelligence, delivered automatically, without new physical infrastructure.
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Riga - Making Public Transport Work for the People Who Depend On It
In Riga, EMERALDS confronted a challenge familiar to many mid-sized European cities: a public transport network generating significant data, but lacking the analytical infrastructure to use it effectively. The project developed a data analytics framework for network optimisation that operates despite real-world constraints on data quality and system integration. Origin-Destination matrices and trip-chaining algorithms revealed actual travel patterns rather than theoretical ones, while segment-level delay analysis, comparing live departure times against scheduled.
The findings aligned closely with Riga's own resident satisfaction surveys.
Built to Last: The Project's Legacy and Exploitation Path
The project's core components [forecasting models, data pipelines, and dashboards] are being integrated into existing municipal operational platforms and commercial products through open APIs and modular architecture. Read here for more
EMERALDS outputs are formally aligned with major EU initiatives, including Mission Cities, Data Spaces, and CIVITAS, ensuring that the project's knowledge, tools, and standards feed into the broader European mobility ecosystem rather than sitting in a repository.
FAIR metadata principles and open, interoperable architectures mean cities can integrate EMERALDS components with confidence that they will remain compatible as municipal IT systems evolve.
York, which participated as an early demonstrator city, further evidences the project's replicability: real-time monitoring combined with historical trend analysis was deployed without specialist programming knowledge, demonstrating that the tools are accessible to transport planners without a data science background.
"EMERALDS demonstrates that real-time, privacy-preserving mobility analytics are not a future aspiration, they are an operational reality. The question is no longer whether European cities can achieve proactive mobility management. It is how quickly decision-makers will act on this evidence."
Policy Recommendations and Next Steps – Have your say!
The Policy Brief calls on municipal transport authorities to begin embedding real-time analytics into daily operations immediately, starting with high-impact, low-risk pilots such as crowd monitoring or bus reliability tracking.
It urges national governments to standardise data-sharing frameworks and provide training pathways so that smaller municipalities, not just major cities, can benefit from these tools.
MEDIA CONTACT & FURTHER INFORMATION
Website: emeralds-horizon.eu
X: @EMERALDSeu
LinkedIn: company/EMERALDSeu
YouTube: @emeraldseu
Zenodo: communities/emeralds
