frog: The Road Ahead

I’m thrilled and delighted to be among the roster of voices consulted for frog’s new report on the future of urban mobility, The Road Ahead. From the introduction:

Learn how mobility leaders are driving customer experiences forward. Creating a position in this new frontier of personalized in-car interactions, immersive buying experiences and wholly new mobility-enabled services will mean putting customers in the driver’s seat. In a new frog report, we ask experts to dig into the conversation around connected mobility, autonomy paradigms and electric vehicles of all types—as well as the new customer experiences and business ecosystems these modalities will inspire.

You can download the entire report here. Listen — or read — my extended interview with frog’s executive creative director Sean Rhodes on frog’s “Design Mind” podcast supporting the report. Here’s a brief excerpt:

I guess the theme for me with urban mobility is what makes a good or functioning city? There’s a great description by Luis Bettencourt, a physicist by training now at the Mansueto Institute, who says that a city is like a star. It’s a giant reactor where you can compress people in space and time to get fusion. Instead of light and heat like a sun, you get ideas and innovation and wages and people.

Transportation is the key to that compression. Mobility is our ability to compress ever greater numbers of people in space and time. The New York City Subway is probably the greatest machine in the United States for compressing people—it’s the keystone urban system that makes everything else possible.