Young people succeed in Sweden with transportation project

At the beginning of June of this year Juan Cordero, Jennifer Guzmán, Alejandra Ortiz and Francisco Vicuña arrived in Sweden to present “Movimillas”, a project focused on promoting the use of public transport in Cuenca.

With Movimillas, the young students of the University of Azuay proposed adding a magnetic field to the Movilízate card to collect points that could later be exchanged for other products.

“In more developed countries they use public transport. And in Cuenca we want its use to be enhanced through incentives, since a developed country is not where the car is used, but the bus, ”explained Francisco.

The project, which was initially presented in December 2018 in a national competition organized by Cedia and turned out to be the winner, allowed them to win a place in the third edition of the world's first global transport hackathon that took place in Sweden. There the people from Cuenca presented Movimillas to characters and authorities related to public transport.

Around 50 projects developed around the world were presented, and after an evaluation Movimillas was ranked among the 12 best works. This allowed young people to be part of an innovation contest.

Due to a multidisciplinary issue, the Cuencans had to separate to work in groups, except for Juan and Francisco. They worked together in the development of a project called the Ecological Recycling Transportation System (TRES), with which it is intended that buses transport organic waste to biogas plants to generate electricity.

Jennifer Guzmán joined a group of foreigners to create Compal, a shared ride application from the airport of a foreign country. The goal of your project is for more people to use a single vehicle to avoid CO2 emissions.

Meanwhile, Alejandra along with her colleagues presented a project to make public transport cards work anywhere in the world through an electronic currency.

Participants had four minutes to explain what the project was about. And after the presentation of all the works, Juan and Francisco's project was chosen as the best in the competition, while Jennifer's Compal finished in third place.

Being among the three best projects in the world allowed the presence of Cuencans in the 63rd edition of the Public Transport Biennial. There they had the opportunity to contact companies interested in applying the works prepared by the young people.

For winning first place, Juan and Francisco will travel to Dubai next year to present their work.