The Week in Mobility — 28 January 2021
Industry Round Up
This week Pete Buttigieg won the senate committee vote to become Biden’s Transport Secretary where he will oversee aviation, highways, vehicles, pipelines and transit. Bolstered by the recently allocated US$39 billion in emergency funding, he will initially be tasked with addressing the US transit systems struggling with dramatically reduced ridership. His first job, however, will be to decide whether to authorise the implementation of New York’s congestion pricing plan requiring drivers to pay a surcharge in certain heavily trafficked Manhattan neighbourhoods- an initiative expected to raise US$1 billion in annual revenue.
In 2009, the decision to pedestrianise Times Square in New York City was regarded at first as lunacy and later nothing short of genius. 12 years on and the Union Square Partnership is hoping to go even further to create New York City’s “most accessible space.” The plan connects landscaped plazas and safe pedestrian friendly spaces whilst leveraging smart tech (including the ever elusive smart bins) to manage traffic and community spaces. Designed over two years following extensive community outreach, the project represents a holistic solution that balances the need for different transportation modes whilst prioritising active travel and creation of safe, inclusive public spaces.
Reclaiming the roads away from cars and towards pedestrians, cyclists and public transport is an ethos gaining ever more momentum in urban transportation conversations. Ford is researching bike-to-vehicle tech to improve safety for the ever growing number of cyclists on the road, whilst MAN, aided by the quietness of an electric powertrain, is piloting off-peak deliveries in urban centres to remove HGVs from the roads during the day.
Interestingly, with MaaS thrown into the mix, the conversation is removing the polarity of how modes of transport are used. Bus, in its verb form, is defined as`transport in a communal road vehicle”. By that definition there’s no need for its noun to still be “a large motor vehicle carrying passengers by road, typically one serving the public on a fixed route and for a fare”, a bus by that logic could in fact be a piggy back.
Citizens in Arlington, Texas are not new to this notion. The city partnered with Via Rideshare in 2017 to fill holes left by traditional public transit with on-demand public transit. Since then, the partnership has increased mobility for 191,000 residents and as of 2020, Via’s platform has reduced congestion in the city by more than 400,000 vehicle miles, representing a 36% reduction in total vehicle miles traveled for those passengers. Uber is planning to expand UberTransit in which walking and public transit options can be seen within the app. In the (current) absence of paying for these options via Uber, it remains to be seen exactly how this differs from CityMapper. However perhaps Uber is best placed to be the transportation aggregator — the Google search engine of MaaS (leaving Lyft to be Bing and CityMapper to become AskJeeves?)
“We share many of the same goals as the cities we serve: reducing individual car ownership, expanding transportation access, and helping governments plan transportation.”
-Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO
Perhaps most curiously of all, are drones. Nowadays they are not destined for the fictional realms of Back to the Future but a serious and real part of the future of mobility. This week American Robotics was granted permission by the FAA to operate drones autonomously and Walmart announced its drone delivery pilot that will start later this summer. Moving goods via air would certainly free up roads for us ground bound mere mortals. However it’s an option that, beyond legislative reasons, hasn’t quite been cracked with regards to determining the best use case, or criteria for drone over road travel. A drone trial in the small Irish town of Oranmore has allowed the 8,000 residents to receive items in as little as 200 seconds from the local Tesco. Manna Aero, the startup developing the drone delivery service, have found the content of the orders illuminating.
“We had someone order a head of broccoli. Who orders a head of broccoli for drone delivery? The broccoli cost 79 cents — and then they paid €5 for the delivery,” says Bobby Healy, founder and chief executive of Manna Aero. “My favourite one was someone at nine in the evening ordering a tub of nappy cream and a melon. You can see the nappy cream might have been an emergency if they had run out. But then they decided to add a melon to the order, you know, because they could.”
The present novelty factor makes it difficult to assess the true potential of drone delivery in its current guise, possibly equivalent to first discovering google earth and zooming in on your own home. Drone delivery for takeaways is faster and cheaper; and could start to help independent restaurants recoup more margin if delivery services replaced their drivers with the tech. It may take some time for drones to make significant reduction to congestion, but in the interim their impact may be a little less direct. Hanger is a real thing, and quick delivery times are a proven way to quell the fall out and by extension — road rage.
The dialogue is shifting and has been energised by Biden’s tougher emission standards, a promise of 645,000 federal electric vehicles, 500,000 electric school buses,1 million US electric auto-making jobs and plans to dramatically improve spending on infrastructure. The combination is just the tonic required to energise mobility players to create holistic, inclusive transportation.
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