Tech companies have a lot to offer the future of mobility, but they can't do it alone
Mobility is a crucial part of cities. It's how we get to work, to the shop, and to see the people we care about. Understanding how the mobility system is created and who it benefits and who it doesn't is essential to ensuring that a city is equitable and that people can get around in the way that matters to them.
Over the past decade or so, tech companies have told us again and again that they were disrupting transportation and that they were going to significantly alter the transportation system and solve many of the problems that exist. They've promised us electric vehicles, ride-hailing services, self-driving cars, and micro mobility services.
But has that really changed the fundamentals of the transportation system? I would argue that it hasn't.
Electric cars play an important role in reducing the climate impact of the transportation system, but they're not the exclusive solution. They're still very energy and resource intensive to create. And while they are part of the solution, they can't be the whole solution.
That's why we need to be focused on getting people out of cars, not just replacing every car that exists with an electric equivalent.
The tech companies' mobility solutions promise us that we don't need to deal with the difficult politics of mobility. Instead, they say that all we need is some new technologies to add to that transportation system and then that will solve traffic congestion, road deaths, and the contribution to climate change made by our transportation systems.
But what we can see after this decades-long experiment is that what we actually need to solve these problems is political action and political will. Just relying on technologies alone will not deliver the benefits that we need.
If we're thinking about what's going to solve the problems with the mobility system as it exists today, it's not going to be new technologies that make it easier for us to hail a taxi or the prospect of computers driving our cars for us. It's going to be government stepping in and taking the actions that are really necessary to address these things.
So that means making major investments in the public transit system to make it more reliable, more frequent, and more accessible. It means investing in cycling infrastructure so that people can get around on a bike and not fear that they're going to get run over by a car in the process. It also means taking space from cars and reallocating it to other forms of mobility, and putting the investment in that direction as well to encourage people to get around in those ways.
There have been several moments where we could have taken a different path, where we could have started to reorient mobility policy in a very different way. And once again, we're offered another opportunity as gas prices and energy prices are going through the roof. We have another chance to see that placing so much focus on the automobile and even now the electric automobile is not the way that we solve our mobility problems.
But rather, it's time to invest in transit, in cycling, in walkable cities, to get people out of cars altogether.
And when we take these actions, we need to ensure that they're equitable. We need to ensure that the people who should be benefiting from better transit services and from better cycling infrastructure are getting those benefits, instead of being priced out because of a private housing system that is not controlled and that we don't insure is equitable.
So the mobility system is one piece of this, but we also need to pay attention to how it's in conversation with other systems within the city to ensure that the policies that we take to improve transportation are equitable for everyone, and not just the people who can afford to live in the areas where those improvements are made.
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Tech companies have a lot to offer the future of mobility, but they can't do it alone. We need government to step up and take the lead, and we need to ensure that the solutions we implement are equitable and accessible to everyone.
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