The State of Play: Connected Mobility + U.S. Cities

Introduction

When it comes to the future of urban mobility, things will get weirder before they get better. For months,  you couldn’t step outside in San Francisco without tripping over a stray bicycle or scooter, but robots were pre-emptively banned from sidewalks. Uber’s new CEO wants to run your city’s buses–or at least sell passes through its app, capturing your customers–at a time when ridership is plummeting nationwide. And if selling suburban Sun Belt residents on transit wasn’t hard enough already, what happens when the Koch brothers fight back with #FakeNews?

We’re here to help. As the first in a series of CityLab Insights, this paper is designed as a short primer to the state of play in connected mobility. Aimed at public officials and transport professionals,  it summarizes current trends, raises questions, and identifies challenges and opportunities in the near- to mid-term.

The first section examines electric and autonomous vehicles,  “micromobility,”  (e.g.,  bicycles and electric scooters) autonomous services, and the emerging field of mobility-as-a-service (i.e.,  seamless multimodality on demand). This is followed by snapshots of four cities grappling with the issues these raise: Seattle, Nashville, Columbus, and Washington, D.C. Finally, it poses three futuristic scenarios by extrapolating from present trends: autonomous micromobility triumphant, solar-powered exurbia, and transit’s collapse and privatization.

More than a guide to the latest buzzwords, this paper starts from the kind of cities we want–safe, accessible, equitable, livable–and asks how technologies will help or hurt in achieving these goals.

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