June proved an extremely important month to the ongoing transformation of urban transportation.
New urban mobility will be a shift to the movement of consumers and goods provided as a service using vehicles of various form factors. In this piece I discuss what cities need to do in order to reap the advantages of new mobility and introduce the consumer’s urban transportation wallet as a composite metric for assessing a metropolitan area’s progress towards Mobility as a Service (MaaS).
The changes we have seen over the past 10 years in urban consumer transportation preferences with the ascend of on-demand mobility services should have convinced OEM executive teams that significant transformations of their business are necessary. For some OEMs transformations will imply producing vehicles that are based on sophisticated technologies, such as self-driving cars. For others it wil imply the adoption of new business models. OEMs will start offering vehicle subscriptions and mobility services directly to consumers as a result of their transformation.
In my forthcoming book Transportation Transformation I define next-generation mobility as the intelligent movement of people and goods using automated (or autonomous), connected and electrified vehicles. Next-generation mobility is still in its infancy, but I predict it will unfold in three phases.
As a result of the movement restrictions imposed because of the pandemic, my 30-mile average daily travel around the Bay Area and the monthly airline trips have all become a 30-step walk to my home-office for video calls. While we’re all eagerly anticipating the lifesaving health outcomes from the measures taken towards the pandemic, the retail, travel, and hospitality industries are reeling.
