Our cities are entering a period of challenge and opportunity, driven by population growth resulting in major congestion at peak travel periods and underutilized capacity at other times of the day.
We don’t have enough real estate to build the requisite infrastructure to cope with that additional peak demand.
The rise of the sharing economy will enable us to stretch existing infrastructure further, but together with increased commercial vehicles from online shopping, this is creating a much more complicated job of managing that shared road-space.
The next wave will begin to solve this – we’ll see concierge services in transit taking delivery of shopping, we’ll see further ride-pooling, smarter bikes, and a more coordinated road-space as vehicles talk to infrastructure, each other and park themselves.
Then there will be the autonomous wave.
Our cars will drive themselves and won’t need to park in the city – they can wait at home or outside the city. We’ll have driverless taxis and cars that are shared as a service. Buses can become driverless, and whilst some may have fixed-routes, others will optimize based on demand. We’ll be charged according to how efficiently we utilize capacity and contribute to sustainability.
If change is the new constant and disruptive technology will solve problems, what is the challenge?
There is a risk that these developments, which individually address part of the problem, do not evolve in a coordinated way. Service providers are beginning to compete on making the convenience of their service obvious to you, but this is leading to the disintegration of information and choices.
We need to enable this disruption to occur within a coordinated framework in a way that benefits people in cities and those that do business in them.
NextCity is Cubic’s roadmap for this coordinated framework – centered around three core principles of integrated customer experience, one account, and integrated operations and analytics.
We need to be predictive and eliminate uncertainty.
We need to have an intimate understanding of our customer preferences, constraints, and habits.
We need to think network-wide, understand real-time conditions and predict the likely conditions in the next few hours.
In business, we use measurements and compensation to incentivize the behavior we want.
Transportation will be no different – if we want to create modal-shift and distribute the peak – we will need to use the payment system as a tool.
If we look at and price the whole transport network, perhaps dynamically, we can charge for and influence how the network is used – through combinations of travel time and price – provided everyone is afforded a viable option.
Integrating data, information and operations will be critical in the future because there will be more silos as new transportation services arise.
