For much of the past decade, Europe’s urban mobility sector has operated in what many practitioners have come to describe as “pilot purgatory.” Autonomous shuttle loops, AI-enabled traffic junctions, smart kerb trials and micro-mobility demonstrations have flourished across cities. These initiatives proved technical feasibility. Yet too often they remained isolated: successful in controlled corridors but disconnected from long-term infrastructure planning, climate targets and social equity frameworks.
At the latest #CitiesFirst webinar, hosted in collaboration with ERTICO - ITS Europe, three senior leaders explored why 2026 represents a decisive turning point: the transition from experimentation to industrialisation, from innovation pilots to permanent, scalable systems.
Featuring Dr. Tamara Djukic, Head of Green & Urban Mobility at ERTICO – ITS Europe, Tina Wagner, Director-General for Transport of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, and Karen Vancluysen, Secretary General of the POLIS Network, the discussion laid the intellectual groundwork for what will define the 17th ITS European Congress in Istanbul next April: deployment at scale.
A Congress Anchored in Climate Delivery
Opening the discussion, Dr. Djukic highlighted why Istanbul is more than a host city: it represents Europe’s evolving mobility mandate.
"Istanbul is a good location, a great location for the Congress because it's one of the mission cities that we have in Europe where we are working and they signed their city climate contracts."
Her remark signals a broader shift. Intelligent Transport Systems are no longer stand-alone innovation domains; they are implementation tools for climate-neutral strategies. Cities that have signed climate city contracts are under pressure to demonstrate measurable progress. Digital mobility solutions must now support binding decarbonisation pathways, not simply technological experimentation.
This evolution is also reflected in the Congress itself. Intelligent Transport Systems are positioned not as innovation showcases, but as core enablers of integrated urban transition embedded within city climate contracts and Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs).
The Congress in Istanbul will convene cities, industry leaders and representatives from the EU institutions around a shared objective: how to operationalise climate commitments through intelligent mobility systems. These questions sit at the heart of the Congress discussions on safety, resilience and multimodal system management - where climate delivery, governance and digital infrastructure converge. They directly reflect the Congress theme, ‘Bridging Innovation: Integrated, Safe and Seamless Mobility’.
This ambition will frame the plenary-level dialogue under the guiding question, ‘One journey: How do we make mobility truly seamless?’. Despite decades of progress in Intelligent Transport Systems, travellers often still experience mobility as fragmented and disconnected. The challenge now is not technological capability, but systemic integration, ensuring that intelligent systems operate coherently across modes, operators and borders.
Digital Infrastructure as Capacity Strategy
Mrs Wagner brought a practitioner’s lens from Hamburg, one of Europe’s most advanced urban digital mobility environments, and previous host city of the 2021 ITS World Congress. Traditionally, increasing urban transport capacity required major physical expansion: new tracks, new lanes, new tunnels.
Today, digitalisation offers an alternative.
By retrofitting legacy infrastructure with advanced signalling systems, automation and data-driven management tools, Hamburg has demonstrated that cities can significantly increase capacity without proportionate carbon-intensive construction.
But this requires cities to lead from the front.
"I think that's very important that we cities also take a leadership because we offer the services, the mobility service, we or our public companies like the transport operators, for example, and re-maintain and extend the infrastructure road, the urban rail, and so on."
Mrs Wagner’s intervention reframes the debate. If municipalities are responsible for maintaining and extending physical infrastructure, they must also assume ownership of the digital layer that governs it. Software, data platforms and AI-driven traffic management are becoming as critical as asphalt and rail.
This shift directly informs the Congress dialogue on multimodal mobility system management: how cities integrate digital intelligence into existing infrastructure rather than expanding it physically.
For public authorities, the implication is clear: scaling intelligent mobility depends less on launching new pilots and more on upgrading existing assets with interoperable digital intelligence.
From Regulator to System Orchestrator
Mrs Vancluysen deepened this perspective by focusing on governance transformation.
"It should become as obvious for cities as it is of today, that they are in charge of physical infrastructure in the future to also be in charge of that digital layer, that digital infrastructure."
Her statement captures one of the central institutional challenges facing European cities. Digital mobility services are often privately developed, yet they fundamentally shape public space and citizen experience. Without public stewardship of interoperability standards, data governance and procurement frameworks, fragmentation persists.
The conversation therefore moved beyond technology to system orchestration. Cities must manage mobility ecosystems, to ensure that public transport, shared services, traffic management and logistics platforms operate within coherent digital architectures aligned with Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans.
This systems-level governance model is expected to feature prominently in Istanbul, where discussions will increasingly centre on institutional capability, regulatory frameworks and transferability — not only on hardware demonstrations.
These governance questions will feature prominently in Istanbul, particularly in discussions on how intelligent systems strengthen urban resilience while ensuring interoperability across modes and operators.
Scaling with Purpose
A recurring theme throughout the webinar was that scale without purpose is insufficient. Intelligent mobility must reduce transport poverty, improve accessibility and contribute to climate neutrality. Deployment must serve citizens across entire metropolitan areas, including peripheral and underserved communities.
Equally important is reducing first-mover risk. Many cities hesitate to transition from pilots to full-scale deployment due to procurement complexity or uncertainty around standards. By sharing implementation playbooks and practical lessons across Europe, the ITS community can accelerate adoption while safeguarding public interest.
This knowledge exchange function sits at the heart of the European Congress model.
The Road to Istanbul 2026
As mobility leaders will gather in Istanbul from 27–29 April 2026, the focus will not only be on whether technology works. That phase is over. The focus will be on how cities integrate digital intelligence into permanent infrastructure systems that meet climate targets and societal expectations.
Istanbul itself embodies the scale at which this transition becomes unavoidable. With a registered population exceeding 16 million and a daytime metropolitan population approaching 20 million, the city operates at the scale of a mid-sized European country. Spanning two continents and divided by the Bosphorus, its transport ecosystem integrates metro, bus, road and maritime networks across complex geography and dense urban fabric. In such an environment, intelligent systems are not experimental add-ons. They are operational necessities.
The Congress is expected to bring together up to 3,000 participants, hundreds of expert speakers and a broad cross-section of public authorities, industry innovators and research institutions. More importantly, it will provide a structured forum for cities to exchange implementation strategies: from digital rail retrofitting to data governance frameworks and interoperable urban platforms.
The CitiesFirst discussion made one conclusion unmistakable: Europe’s mobility transition has entered its delivery era. Istanbul 2026 will serve not merely as a showcase of innovation, but as a milestone in the scaling of intelligent, climate-aligned urban mobility systems.
For public authorities and mobility leaders alike, the invitation is strategic rather than promotional: come prepared to discuss deployment, governance and long-term integration. The next chapter of intelligent transport in Europe will be written not in pilot corridors, but in permanent systems — and Istanbul will help define that trajectory
The conversation continues in Istanbul, 27–29 April 2026.