We highlight following four technical sessions that involve academic-industry collaboration.

Together with the Mobility2Grid Research Campus of TU Berlin, a special session on electrification of public transport will be held. Opportunities and challenges of E-Bus operation as well as two-way charging of buses will be discussed. The technical session follows on from a workshop on Transition Process, Impacts and Risks of Public Transport Electrification held in Kyoto in May 2024.

Together with the Open Transit Software Foundation a special session will be held on the use of crowdsourced and open data for public transport planning. Open-source transit rider information tools such as OneBusAway, the increasing availability of publicly available GTFS feeds, and the ability to understand public transport usage trends from voluntary user contributions will be discussed.

Together with the Transport Strategy Centre (TSC) at Imperial College London a special session will be held on the topic of benchmarking public transport systems. TSC has over 25 years experience in benchmarking mass transit systems, including work on urban metros, mainline railways, light rail, buses, and airports. TSC has further recently expanded benchmarking into other public infrastructure systems. In the session in particular the challenges of comparing the performance of public transport systems given the changing role of mainstream public transport in cities will be discussed.

Related to this, together with the My-MobilityCo-CreationCenter at Nagoya University a special session will be held on Evaluating Evolving Mobility Services. Through various projects and case studies in Japan the center has been looking at the impact of combining convential public transport with various mobility services such as demand-responsive transport and Mobility-as-a-Service concepts that have been introduced in the past decade.