It is hard, and not advisable, to make long-term decisions in the midst of the pandemic. But as certain mobility practices that are adopted during this period become part of our daily routines it is absolutely important to assess the potential of enduring after the pandemic. With that in mind, we may have the unique opportunity to hit the reset button and transform urban mobility.
Cities, and more broadly metropolitan areas, are the laboratories where many next-generation mobility concepts and technologies are being tested, and where the transformation of transportation will first become evident.
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.
