Article by: Asst.Prof. Suwan Juntiwasarakij, Ph.D., MEGA Tech Senior Editor
It has been almost three centuries that the industrial revolution has been introduced. A variety of economic, political, and technological forces converged, drawing more and more people into cities. At the turn of the 21st century, cities around the globe are growing at a rate that no one could have ever predicted in the past.
With many opportunities available, people are now incentivized to relocate to urban areas in the search to improve their quality of life. With increasing urbanization, cities will start to face significant challenges in the future, including the need for more infrastructure, the improvement of health services, and the management of energy resources. One particular critical challenge is mobility since it drives cities’ economic growth.
According to Deloitte, many cities are experiencing the downside associated with overload and inefficient roads and transit systems. In the most congested cities, drivers spend between 100 and 200-plus hours per year and 2 to 5 entire workweeks stuck in traffic. The cumulative impact on US GDP of deteriorating infrastructure could exceed $500 billion dollars annually by 2040.
There are many initiatives shaping the way people move around the city. Already, investment has flooded into the industry, smart mobility, and some city authorities in other countries are further along in the use of smart mobility technology. London exploits vast amounts of data about how people move across its transportation network to better manage traffic throughout the city. A central system pulls data from 9,200 buses, 6,000 traffic signals, and, 1,400 cameras, and adjusts signals to improve vehicle flows. New York City is piloting connected vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure technology to improve the safety of travelers and pedestrians through deployments in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Cities like Tokyo, Phoenix, and Singapore have all successfully tested autonomous taxis.
In order to harness emerging technologies to solve the most vexing problems, cities would need a comprehensive, integrated system that transcends exiting infrastructure, drives standardization and interoperability, enables value creation by key parties, and cultivates technological advancements. That is, a city would need a mobility operating system (mOS): an integrated platform that brings together physical infrastructure (roads, rails), modes of transport (cars, public transit, ridesharing, bike sharing, etc.), and transportation service provider (aggregators, public transport system) and crates greater thought and optimization systemwide through market clearing mechanism.
A city’s mobility platform can help equilibrate supply and demand and also facilitate traffic throughput by adjusting incentives, most directly by calibrating prices across modes and locations but also through the use of behavioral nudges such as framing and social proofs. However, establishing a fully realized mobility operating system is a significant endeavor likely to play out over the course of many years. Even so, there are tangible benefits that can be realized from more incremental steps and that lay the foundation for additional capabilities as the system mature. In this regard, a city can begin by better understanding, utilizing, and managing its existing infrastructure, perhaps in a particular neighborhood. This eventually leads to managing multiple modes of transportation across the city, improving congestion and accessibility, on the way to building truly all-encompassing system that can create systemwide optimization.
All in all, the greatest barriers to an integrated mobility platform are likely to be political, social, and economic rather than technical. to successfully implement a digital mobility platform, municipalities should move beyond traditional transportation policy and funding frameworks. Also, cities should harness the remarkable technological innovations of recent years to create a common platform that enables visibility, interoperability, and optimization across the transportation network’s many nodes and modalities.