The railway sector has historically been one of the most traditional in the German multinational Siemens. For five years, Siemens Mobility has been the independent company that brings together the manufacture of trains, as well as railway signaling and new transport IT systems that go beyond the train itself. Thus, the centenary industrial production of the Cornellà plant coexists in Spain with a new R&D center in Madrid.
After all the problems that public transport went through during the pandemic, have exciting projects returned to the sector?
The number of users is already higher than before, but the patterns have changed a lot. There are more weekend trips for leisure and less for work at seven in the morning. Even so, the subway is crowded first thing in the morning and after a while it is empty. Digitized operating systems allow us to have more adaptability and, therefore, capacity is gained. Four times as many people could be transported during the day if it were used all the time. It is a great opportunity to use the freedom that some companies offer with teleworking and drive this change to build a better public transport system.
While the automotive sector still has a long way to go before the autonomous vehicle becomes widespread, automated metro lines have been a reality for years. Will they all end up like this?
There are more and more trains around the world like the L9 in Barcelona. It is an advance because you can put more circulations, up to every 60 seconds if you want, and increase the capacity of the line considerably, up to 30% more than if it were operated in a conventional way. With a conductor, one train cannot go so close to the other.
Is it also feasible for rail lines such as commuter lines?
We have done it, although it is much more difficult because you do not have a tunnel and there are many more elements outside, as well as coexisting with various technologies. In Hamburg we have a first project with the Deutsche Bahn, and sooner or later it will end up reaching more places.
And the drivers?
Jobs will not disappear. The cost of operations for railway companies is not in the train drivers, but in the energy savings involved in moving more people in a more efficient way. There are fully automated lines that maintain the driver because, let’s be honest, we like to have a person in front when we go as passengers. If there is someone on the train causing trouble, there will at least be one person you can talk to.
Is the wave of artificial intelligence also reaching the railway?
All our trains have artificial intelligence inside. When the door of a train begins to fail, it consumes more energy, and that data is enough to detect that it will stop working in the next two weeks if it is not fixed.
They have a pilot test underway with Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat to transfer the complex railway control system of a station to the cloud. It is the future?
Of course, the first interlocking in the cloud in Sant Boi is working with a standardized server, without the need for expensive specific hardware. In Norway the entire country will be centralized at a single checkpoint in Oslo. Here you could have one in Barcelona and another in Madrid. In this way, if a machine breaks down in Zaragoza, you can analyze the data without having to drive 300 kilometers.
Aren’t you worried about cybersecurity?
Let’s not forget that a conventional interlock is also open to anyone breaking in and tampering with it. In this case, the cloud is ours, it is not hosted in San Francisco, it may be in an Adif basement. The data does not go through the internet, it goes from the device to the proprietary cloud and there are three layers of security. The last one, even if there was a cyberattack, guarantees that unsafe operations cannot be carried out because the system does not accept illogical actions in terms of railway security.
Mobility as a service (mobility as a service, MaaS) is one of the great challenges of the moment. Siemens has designed the Renfe application, doco, which allows you to combine the AVE ticket with taxis, scooters and shared motorcycles to and from the station. Is it giving the expected results?
It’s starting, it’s too early to judge. The idea is excellent: unify long-distance train journeys with micromobility services.
It seems that there are many applications trying to gain a foothold, but none powerful enough to generalize its use.
There is a lot of trial and error still. You come across operators who don’t want anyone else to sell their tickets and prefer the traveler to have to make three purchases for one trip. That is a nuisance. In the Netherlands we have already integrated several cities. Greater orchestration of the entire system is needed, with the first and last mile in mind.
Is it the most complicated point?
We have created a specialized software unit in Spain, and one of its objectives is to integrate the large number of existing microservices. It is being more complicated than we thought due to the large number of different interfaces. If there was standardization from the beginning, any startup that invents a new mobility service could access that data and then it would be easier.
Does the excess of companies offering the same benefit or harm?
Here in Barcelona, ??shared electric bicycles are mostly from a single public provider, that is a good thing, it makes management easier. In other cities it is a complete disaster: you have fifteen different colors of bikes, people get angry because they are parked everywhere and on top of that it is not intuitive for users. It’s like littering in the city. The same goes for shared scooters. Paris has ended up banning them for this reason, despite the fact that they can be very useful as a mobility solution in a city like Barcelona, ??with a powerful metro system that acts as the backbone.
In what situation do you see the Catalan capital in terms of mobility?
The controversy over the prohibition of polluting cars in the center of the city occurs everywhere. It’s a hostile discussion. Here in Barcelona you also have superblocks and the debate around them should be much more positive.
The public debate has been very bitter in recent months.
If you make an area exclusively for pedestrians, they accuse you of wanting to remove the cars from the city and a confrontation is created. Projects have very little chance of being a success if you make them anti-something. If you want to make a bike lane and close the street to cars on the same day, without an alternative, it won’t get very far. But if you ask a Barcelona resident how he wants to live on his street, everyone agrees that he wants to be able to play with the children on the street. Once the change is made, no one wants to have a parking area back in place.
