Mobility and urban development have a symbiotic relationship
Ever since the mainstreaming of the motor vehicle at the turn of the previous century, mobility has played a pivotal role in urban development and vice versa. Increased private vehicle ownership, as well as investments in public transit networks and urban road infrastructure, have significantly influenced the shape of today’s urban fabric – city design, economic growth and opportunities and overall quality of life.
These same advancements in urban mobility, however, have also contributed to the challenges that the cities of today are trying to address – increased traffic congestion, longer commute times, higher greenhouse gas emissions and higher numbers of traffic accidents.
And we expect these trends to continue to accelerate with increased urbanization. By 2030, the United Nations estimates that megacities (metropolises with at least 10 million residents) will be home to more than 750 million people globally, a 35% increase from today. According to the World Economic Forum, the number of cars worldwide are set to increase from 1.1 billion in 2019 to 2.0 billion by 2040.
Given this rapid growth coupled with aging urban infrastructure and constrained budgets, city planners need to adopt more innovative and efficient approaches to addressing these challenges and enabling a modern, safe, convenient and sustainable urban mobility ecosystem for the future.
Technology and data are enabling new possibilities
As many modern technologies like IoT and edge, 5G and artificial intelligence mature and converge, we are witnessing data-led disruptions in many parts of the urban mobility ecosystem – ride hailing and sharing, advanced traffic management systems, mobility-as-a-Service, e-tolling, contactless public transit payments and micro-mobility to name a few.
Further advancements in alternative fuel technologies, including electrification of the vehicle fleet and mainstreaming of autonomous passenger and freight mobility, promise to further disrupt existing mobility paradigms.
These disruptions will in turn have a significant and positive cascading effect on other aspects of city administration and operation. We anticipate such improvements as:
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- Integrated, efficient and safer urban traffic management and operations, with real time situational awareness and integrated incident response capabilities.
- Reduced pollution and emissions through sustainable mobility approaches like electric vehicles and advanced public transit systems.
- Greater citizen convenience through innovative mobility solutions and services such as seamless and multi-modal mobility-as-a-Service and contactless payments.
- New urban planning approaches that can support and grow next generation urban mobility technologies like autonomous mobility, vehicle-to-everything communication and drones.
This transformation will be a multi-year journey
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- Focus on the outcomes. It is important that cities understand and prioritize citizen expectations and set medium to long-term visions and roadmaps that clearly define specific, achievable outcomes.
- Identify key proven and validated solutions. Identifying the right solutions and partners in today’s highly fragmented and diversified solution ecosystem may pose a key challenge for cities. Having the right approach to solution and partner selection, while ensuring the reliability, sustainability and scalability of solutions is critical.
- Start small but plan for scale and future. Lack of funding is often a key constraint that prevents many projects from taking off after the proof-of-concept stage. An agile, modular solution approach that enables cities to start small (for example, modernizing traffic flow at a single intersection to assess the value to the local community) but scale over time can enable cities to accommodate growth while also providing the flexibility to adapt as necessary.
- Integrated platform-driven approach toward “system of systems”. As cities embark on their digital transformation roadmaps one outcome at a time, they risk building siloed solutions – across vendors, technologies, etc. Having a consistent, open and modern platform-driven approach that integrates these multiple systems (traffic management, violation enforcement, public transit operations and more) into a “system of systems” and leverages the cross-domain data efficiently across multiple solutions is critical to realizing the true value of this transformation.
- Cybersecurity. As cities get digitized and data becomes ubiquitous, securing the city’s assets and citizens from potential cyber threats has become a critical agenda for administrators. This, along with the need to ensure citizen trust and data privacy, makes it critical that cities adopt solution architectures that incorporate data security and privacy as native features.
We are at the cusp on a significant technology disruption in the mobility sector which promises some unprecedented outcomes for the betterment of our cities. This, in turn, necessitates that cities adapt and transform multiple facets of their operations and administration and is going to be a complex, iterative and multi-year journey. It is therefore critical for cities to adopt a strong digital foundation that is agile, scalable, modern, future-proof and secure while also engaging with an ecosystem of partners who are aligned to this approach and can enable cities to deliver real citizen outcomes and evolve into competitive and thriving modern societies of the future.
