Come engage with Gil Friend (Chief Sustainability Officer, Palo Alto) – and special guests from Finland--to learn about the city's sustainability options, and how a sustainable, carbon-free Palo Alto can improve the quality of our lives, encourage a more connected and healthier place to live and be a model for the world.

Gil will talk about the city’s new Sustainability and Climate Action Plan (S/CAP), now in development; he’ll explore the critical challenges we now face—in transportation, electrification (fuel switching) and finance—and some of the bold strategies we’re considering. And he’ll introduce Finland’s ambitious new initiative, envisioned in 24-year-old Sonja Heikkila’s Mobility as a Service (MaaS) masters thesis.

Sonja (now at Finland’s Tekes Innovation Agency), and her colleagues from the City of Helsinki and the Finland Ministry of Transportation—visiting Palo Alto this week--will describe how MaaS can provide a seamless, door-to-door combination of transportation mode—including public & private transit, bikeshare, rideshare, carshare, vanpool, taxi, employer commute benefits, electric scooter/bike lease, pay-by-phone parking, future robo-taxis—to outcompete private auto ownership. The “Mobility Operator” aggregates all services into a unified smartphone app with easy fare payment, one-stop billing, and innovative subscription pricing.

Finland is curating an open, interoperable ecosystem (APIs for schedules, payment, and location), and have convened a 70-company industry association with recognizable brands. They are developing business models and software platforms to enable “Mobility Operators” to aggregate and deliver services, and planning a Spring 2015 pilot launch. Palo Alto, Joint Venture Silicon Valley and Finland are exploring collaboration to bring MaaS to Silicon Valley, and to transform transportation in the region--dissolving the boundaries between different transport modes, providing a more customer-centered experience while improving the efficiency of the entire transport system.