Public Funding for Groaqua Limited

The Smarter Travel Solution (STS) is an ambitious integrated transport project to bring the entire management and completion of a journey, or all your journey needs, under one umbrella, supporting and engaging with the user from first thought through to arrival in a “one screen journey”. Using digital mobile/internet technology, STS supports the use and combination of bus, rail, walking, cycling, taxi and car club, bringing the modes together as a complete solution both in practical terms and, even more importantly, in the mind of the traveller. By encouraging the user to see these shared/active modes of transport as one portfolio solution, it can shift user perception so that sustainable, shared modes become the new default. STS provides unprecedented integration of journey planning, booking/payment, in-journey information and entertainment, and journey history to help the user manage their transport habits. STS is a digital mobile/internet solution which takes existing and planned Local Authority solutions (bus & rail accessed by smartcard/phone) and integrates them with private sector transport (taxi, car club) and active travel through all stages of a journey.

This project will build the UK's first aquaponic urban farm to quantify the economic and environmental potential of sustainable urban farming. Led by GrowUp - a start-up specialising in aquaponic farming - it will use aquaponics in an innovative configuration to exploit a symbiosis between wastestreams of aquaculture and nutrients required for hydroponic plant growth. The consortium's expertise in aquaponics, commercial hydroponics & recirculating aquaculture will allow them to manage and investigate this relationship at scale in an urban location in London. The project will build a prototype to demonstrate scaled urban production, focused on optimised control of growing systems, creating an opportunity for the franchise of a UK global commercial offering in local, urban sustainable intensified agriculture. Consortium partners are GrowUp Urban Farms; I+S Associates; Sterner AquaTech and Arup, including support from the GLA, the London Borough of Newham, Siemens and Plymouth University.

Siemens and the SYPTE are planning to offer a unique and innovative IT solution for South Yorkshire in order to improve local citizen and traveller access to comprehensive, yet personalised, travel information (particularly across the various transport modes) enabling better informed journey choices to be made. The Feasibility Study will focus on specific local use cases, describing the potential integrated and multi-modal approaches that will be possible once the final system has been implemented. The Integrated Mobility Platform will enable an integrated transport network to become a reality for South Yorkshire and beyond, encouraging the utilisation of multiple transport modes within a single journey. The Feasibility Study will demonstrate the added value for all stakeholder groups: the end traveller, the local citizen, the local authorities, the passenger transport executive and the public and private operators. The project will promote more efficient journeys allowing South Yorkshire residents to be more productive, taking advantage of the integrated connections available and, ultimately, encouraging more inward investment for the area.