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Groningen logistics dashboard shared at the InnoWaTr final event

The Province of Groningen has shared the logistics dashboard we built with them on LinkedIn, and the European project InnoWaTr put it in the spotlight at its closing conference in Harlingen.

The dashboard brings freight transport by road, rail and inland shipping together in one view. It shows where goods come from and where they go, which fuels are used along the way, and where a shift to water or rail would pay off most. The Province of Groningen and Logistiek Noord developed it; we built it.

It was on show at the closing conference of InnoWaTr on 28 May 2026 at the Maritime Academy in Harlingen. InnoWaTr is an Interreg North Sea project (2023–2026) in which 24 European partners worked on smarter and more sustainable freight transport by water. In the announcement for that conference, the project held the dashboard up as an example of how data makes a modal shift concrete: not an ambition, but a question about which flows genuinely lend themselves to it.

The dashboard was built under the name Dijksterhuis Onderzoek & Advies, now part of Wendix.

Passenger mobility in the Netherlands

Statistics Netherlands has published its mobility data for 2024, a little later than usual. Between us we travelled some 4 billion kilometres more than in 2023. The mix of transport was much the same, though slightly more of it was active travel or public transport.

Wendix has built a free interactive visualisation of the data.

Built on open data from Statistics Netherlands (StatLine)

Energy use of the Groningen vehicle fleet

The energy use of cars, vans and lorries falls by almost 60% when every fossil-fuelled vehicle is replaced by a far more efficient electric motor.

For the Province of Groningen, Dijksterhuis Onderzoek (now part of Wendix) set out the whole vehicle fleet in a dashboard. In 2025 the road vehicles registered in Groningen used around 3.2 TWh of energy. Fully electric, that would have been around 1.3 TWh. The extra demand for electricity is equivalent to almost half a million households.

Scaled up to the whole country (methodologically shaky, but illustrative): road traffic in the Netherlands used well over 120 TWh of fuel energy in 2024. Electric, that would be around 52 TWh, the equivalent of roughly 20 million homes, or some 35 times the annual output of the Fryslân wind farm.

The figures take no account of grid congestion, charging infrastructure, life cycle or purchase costs. And sustainability is broader than electrification: more cycling, public transport, shared mobility and transport by water or rail. But the potential is enormous. The question is not whether it would make a difference, but how to put the conditions in place.

The dashboard combines data from the vehicle authority RDW, Statistics Netherlands, TNO and ElaadNL, and lets users answer their own research questions.

Will autonomous delivery robots take over the streetscape?

Intertraffic Amsterdam showed again how far autonomous technology has come. The near future of self-driving mobility may well look different from what you expect.

Autonomous vehicles have been driving in controlled environments such as factory floors and port terminals for some time. The next step may not be the self-driving car, but small ground robots delivering parcels and food along the pavement and the cycle path. Interaction with other road users is complex (the human factor), but road safety is probably easier to safeguard there.

Ten years ago, optimists predicted fully self-driving cars within three to five years. Some of that arrived (Waymo in San Francisco, Baidu's Apollo in China), but for the ordinary passenger car progress has been slower. Even Tesla's Full Self Driving is still level 2 on the SAE scale: the driver has to keep paying attention.

Autonomy has been reality elsewhere for years: automatic trains (since the 1980s), metros (Tokyo, 1995), a self-driving shuttle at Rotterdam The Hague Airport (2025) and the unmanned Norwegian Yara Birkeland at sea. Starship Technologies has been deploying small six-wheeled delivery robots since 2018, by now in more than 100 cities.

The human factors design is strikingly likeable: the robots stay out of your way, back off when blocked, thank you with a little chime and ask politely for help when they get stuck. BBC interviews in Sunderland and Cambridge found reactions to be largely positive: "cute", "shy" and "waiting nicely" at pedestrian crossings.

The technology looks ready and the safety risks limited. In the Netherlands it has been permitted on a few campuses since 2023; the hold-up is mainly regulation, and permission to try it properly.