Back to Normal? Cities Say, ‘No Thanks’
The pandemic has fundamentally changed our perception of how we can live, work, and move. We’ve figured out how to get goods and services without jumping in the car. We’ve learned that all sorts of jobs can be done from home offices. And we’ve learned that people like, and want, to walk and bike as part of their daily journey. Cleaner air, quieter neighborhoods, and healthier residents can be among the positive outcomes of the crisis for cities that were on their heels with traffic and congestion before. Smarter mobility can help retain these benefits.
How to Move More People with Fewer Vehicles
Accenture analysts recently released a report calling for cities to take the lead in creating coordinated, “orchestrated” mobility ecosystems. Limiting shared services to routes that connect people with mass transit would be one way to deploy human-driven services now and to prepare for driverless service in the future. Services and schedules can be linked at the backend, and operators can, for example, automatically send more shared vehicles to a train station when the train has more passengers than usual, or tell the shared vehicles to wait for a train that is running late.
Managing urban congestion and mobility comes down to the matter of managing space. Cities are characterized by defined and restricted residential, commercial, and transportation spaces. Private autos are the most inefficient use of transportation space, and mass transit represents the most efficient use of transportation space. Getting more people out of private cars, and into shared feeder routes to and from mass transit modes is the most promising way to reduce auto traffic. Computer models show that it can be done, and we don’t need autonomous vehicles to realize the benefits of shared mobility.
How to Prepare our Cities For Autonomous Vehicles
Shared mobility services have been proposed as a solution to urban congestion. When Uber and Lyft launched a decade ago, proponents of this model of peer-to-peer “ride sharing” claimed it would revolutionize public transportation to the point of replacing it. Opponents of a 2016 ballot measure to fund transit projects in Detroit wrote, “The proposal spends billions on old transit tech like buses and rail while other cities are contracting out transit services to Uber, Lyft, Chariot and others that provide door-to-door service at substantial savings.”
In the meantime, we’ve learned that peer-to-peer ride sharing services, better called ride-hailing services since they primarily function as taxis carrying individual passengers, have made traffic 180 percent worse in some cities. They have over-supplied the market with vehicles that are empty most of the time, on average adding 2.8 miles of traffic for every mile they carry passengers.