Future transport: From MaaS to the Internet of Mobility
Throughout the 20th century, the American dream was commonly depicted as moving out to the suburbs with a white picket fence and a car (usually a Ford) in the garage. Over the decades, this dream expanded to a larger home and a three-car garage to house cars for both parents and one for children of driving age.
The dream was birthed in the US and created a contagion in cities and countries around the globe. As our global population grew and our cities sprawled, the original American dream started looking more and more like a nightmare. Jane Jacobs, of course, poignantly and convincingly demonstrated how America’s fascination with the personal automobile contributed to the decay of culture and quality of life in cities.
Municipal, regional and national governments have spent trillions of dollars to build and maintain highway infrastructure (and major utility connections) for the growing suburban masses.
Traffic congestion costs more than $300 billion (£234 billion) to the US economy annually and reduces quality of life. Emissions from transportation in the EU represent 25 per cent of total GHG emissions in the region. Furthermore, the car-dependent suburban life has exacerbated obesity and ill-health, while air contamination (much of which comes from transportation) leads to more than 5 million deaths worldwide on an annual basis.
Urbanists, transportation professionals and the entire automobile industry have converged on these challenges and begun exploring how new technologies and new business models can adapt to the changing mobility requirements of the 21st century.
The bar has been set high, and what is required is a mobility ecosystem based on shared infrastructure, where resources, data and value can be exchanged seamlessly.
Without shared infrastructure and a collaborative approach, siloed operating systems and data will limit the transformational impact of multimodal mobility, and smart cities will remain only a dream.
in 2014 – which now seems like ages ago – Jan Kietzmann and I published a peer-reviewed article* examining how 12 different shared mobility business models could impact urban sustainability and citizen value.
Leveraging four criteria from the concept of business models for sustainability (BMfS), we concluded that the most optimal shared mobility business models for achieving sustainability outcomes are those that blend public and private approaches.
In recent years, we have certainly witnessed major concerns regarding technology-driven, venture-capital-backed mobility companies who have entered cities with more monopolistic approaches to shared mobility.
At iomob, we believe that cities need to embrace experimentation and to liberally apply the concept of sandboxes. Here, experimentation can take place to understand on a small scale the implications of new mobility while regulators catch up to the pace of innovation and solutions.
Mobility is becoming decentralised, multimodal and automated. Increasingly, it aspires to be sustainable too.
However, without rethinking the city, and even national-level approach to infrastructure for this emergent mobility landscape, we will face yet another tragedy of the commons.
The sharing economy is still young, and we still have time at this unique point in history, where we are technologically enabled to ensure that freedom of movement remains, and is protected as a basic human right.
Regulation is needed to ensure private mobility service providers (MSPs) operate in acceptable ways (and their customers behave correctly too). But more than that, we require technology that enables these companies, who are otherwise competing with each other in siloed verticals, to collaborate and share data between themselves and win municipal governments for a mutually beneficial situation.
The rapid escalation of dockless bike-sharing services is a great example. The potential for dockless bike-sharing to be a vibrant part of the mobility mix is strong.
