Mobility runs on data, but most of it never crosses a border. Europe’s transport systems generate enormous volumes of information every minute: traffic flows, public transport timetables, charging-point availability, freight movements, parking occupancy, environmental indicators. Yet the vast majority remains locked inside the city, region, or operator that produced it. The result is a continent of digital silos that limits everything from cross-border journey planning to logistics optimisation to the rollout of connected and autonomous vehicles.
The European Mobility Data Hub is Drive2Transform’s response to this fragmentation. As part of the project, transnational expert groups have identified and developed five priority use cases for the automotive transformation in Central Europe. This is the third and final article in the series.
After Autonomous Driving and Electrification, we now present the use case idea developed by the Platform Economy Expert Group: a single, ambitious concept the group identified as the connective tissue for the entire Drive2Transform portfolio. As with the others, this is a starting point for further discussion with interested companies, institutions, and stakeholders.
Use Case: A European Mobility Data Hub
The use case idea proposes a shared, interoperable platform where public authorities, transport operators, infrastructure providers, and technology companies exchange real-time mobility data under unified EU standards. It supports the EU Data Governance Act, the EU Data Act, and the emerging European Mobility Data Space, and creates a foundation for cross-border services in multimodal travel, logistics, traffic management, and smart-city development.
Six partner regions across five countries have contributed Regional Exploitation Plans. The diversity of approaches is striking: from established open-data platforms to city-built prototypes, from rural-mobility methodologies to corridor-level freight integration, from national-scale infrastructure to bottom-up municipal solutions. No partner duplicates another. Every gap in the European mobility data landscape finds a custodian.
Unlike the other Drive2Transform use cases, where regional deployment can proceed largely independently, a mobility data hub creates value primarily through network effects. The more regions connected, the more data available, and the greater the utility for every participant. That makes cross-border interoperability not just desirable, but essential to the business case.
What the Expert Group Found
- Several data corridors are pilot-ready today. Established cross-border commuter and freight corridors, automotive supply-chain triangles, and Alpine transit and tourism axes already follow physical transport routes where data integration would produce measurable improvements in journey time, logistics efficiency, and passenger experience. These are the natural starting points for the first transnational data exchange pilots.
- Open source as a strategic scaling principle. When proprietary platforms scale, the vendor captures the licensing revenue. When open-source platforms scale, adopting regions capture the full value of customisation, integration, and data services locally, while contributing improvements back to the shared codebase. The expert group sees open source as a foundational principle for shared European data infrastructure.
- Six partners, six European gaps, no duplication. The consortium covers a medium-sized-city blueprint replicable across hundreds of comparable European cities; a rural-mobility methodology that addresses what is arguably the largest gap in the European Mobility Data Space; a freight and logistics dimension underrepresented elsewhere; an automotive-data sovereignty framing for regions where data services are existential to the local economy; V2X-ready national infrastructure; and a production-grade reference platform with a decade of operational experience.
- The Hub is the integration layer for all other use cases. Battery Passport traceability, charging-station data, autonomous shuttle telemetry, and agricultural sensor streams all require exactly the kind of standardised, cross-border data exchange this use case provides. Treated this way, it stops being a parallel workstream and becomes the connective tissue of the entire Transnational Exploitation Plan.
Join the Conversation
The Drive2Transform Platform Economy Expert Group will convene online on 12 May 2026 to advance this use case idea into a Transnational Exploitation Plan, which will be validated at the Second D2T Automotive Conference in Linz on 22–23 September 2026.
Are you a public transport authority, logistics operator, city administration, ICT provider, infrastructure operator, app developer, or research institution working on mobility data? We are looking for partners who want to help build the European Mobility Data Hub, and who see the value of network effects, open standards, and shared infrastructure. Get in touch to explore how you can contribute.
About Drive2Transform
Drive2Transform (CE0200679) is an EU-funded Interreg Central Europe project connecting nine partner organisations across eight countries. The project supports automotive regions in navigating the transition towards sustainable, digital, and autonomous mobility. This article concludes the three-part series presenting the project’s five use cases, each developed by dedicated transnational expert groups: Autonomous Driving (Part 1), Electrification (Part 2), and Platform Economy (Part 3).