A vision for ubiquitous urban mobility

1. A vision for ubiquitous urban mobility Jade Ebenezer Transitioning strategy into execution. Business development, change management, human capital and operations leader. The new sharing economy is opening up a world of new possibilities in the world of transportation and urban mobility. The era of people buying and owning their own cars – a paradigm that has existed for nearly 100 years and that was famously documented in the 1996 film “Taken For a Ride” – is giving way to an entirely new paradigm. Click Here to watch "Taken for a Ride" on Youtube This new paradigm is based on the model of ride sharing, car sharing and taxi cab hailing that companies such as Europcar and Uber have made popular in Europe and around the world. It’s based on a blindingly obvious logic: most people only use their cars for a few hours each day, if that. For the rest of the day, the cars sit idle. And now, thanks to companies such as Ubeeqo, we are seeing the next evolution in this new paradigm: a world of ubiquitous urban mobility. At Ubeeqo, we see this model as a credible and sustainable alternative to the private car ownership model, especially within densely populated urban centers. Imagine, for a moment, what truly ubiquitous urban mobility would look like. You’d step out of

2. your residence and a private car would be waiting for you to take you to work, to school or to the office. When your day at school or work was over, another car (or the same car, if you’d like) would be waiting to take you back home. It would arrive at exactly the right time and at exactly the right place. Thanks to mobile app technology, you would already have the optimal route to get you home programmed into a GPS device. You would be able to adjust any specifics about the route with your app and find a new parking place as well. This technology largely exists. What’s missing, though, are specialized mobility solutions that go beyond just a car for everyday needs. What if you need a taxi to take you to the airport or a different type of car for a weekend trip? It may not be the case that the vehicle currently parked outside your house or apartment is the optimal choice. That’s why it’s better to talk about “urban mobility” – the term is broad and deep enough to convey what really matters – there are many ways to get around a crowded metropolis. What people want are solutions that are safe, cheap, connected and, yes, ubiquitous. The last term is perhaps the most important – if a solution is not ubiquitous, people won’t use it. It has to be guaranteed of getting you from Point A to Point B, no questions asked. That’s one reason why the private car ownership model has proven so enduring – for decades, people thought that having their own private vehicle was the only guarantee of getting from Point A to Point B on time. That is, until now. What technology is doing, however, is changing the value proposition. It’s no longer always cheaper, easier and more efficient to own your own car. That’s especially true in densely populated urban areas where some features – such as a cheap place to park for the day – are actually harder to figure out than one might think. Traffic is another nightmare for urban dwellers. That’s one big reason why “congestion pricing” is one of those ideas that continually gets traction in cities such as New York or London. The problem of urban congestion was actually one of the big ideas in the 1996 documentary film “Taken For a Ride” – today’s biggest car manufacturers created a system of urban mobility that was remarkably car-centric but not people-centric. These automakers continually lobbied for ways to reduce the scope and impact of public transportation and build out the modern highway system for cars. To really nail the urban congestion problem, there’s still work to be done in getting all of these vehicles on the roads to talk to each other. You want these vehicles to be able to avoid traffic jams, to know which roads are closed or being repaired, and to know when it’s better to take public transportation rather than private transportation. Mobile technology plays an important role. You should be able to locate a car, book it, pay for it - and find a parking place for it - with a simple mobile app. That app experience should be simple and seamless and the pricing should be completely transparent. Once that’s possible, the value proposition for owning your own car diminishes to zero. Where this vision of the future of transportation gets really exciting is when we think about the

3. ways that technology is transforming the car itself. Think about new apps such as Waze, which is essentially a real-time social network for vehicles. (Link: https://www.waze.com/) The innovation that everyone is talking about now, of course, is the driverless car. It’s not just that the driverless car will be more efficient, less prone to accidents, and faster at getting you from Point A to Point B - the driverless car may call for entirely new configurations of what today we refer to as “the car.” Some have proposed that these driverless cars will be more like driverless trains, capable of moving in tandem to cut down on traffic, with their own entertainment systems. A good way to understand the changes afoot is to watch (or re-watch) “Taken For a Ride,” which outlined all the opportunities and challenges in the urban mobility model as people saw them decades ago. It’s striking how many of these innovations are being talked about today, such as the role of the computer and information industries in changing the future of the automobile, the futuristic potential for highway systems of self-driving cars, and a scenario in which autonomous vehicles drive 60 miles per hour, bumper-to-bumper as part of a massively orchestrated transportation grid. Thinking about the future is important. What’s needed now is more debate about how to generate interest and awareness about solutions to urban mobility problems experienced in cities such as Paris and London. At Ubeeqo, we consider ourselves a market leader. As a new entrant in the European market, we have the relationships, expertise and experience to make the dream of ubiquitous urban mobility a reality. We continually ask ourselves: Does the city exist for people, or does it exist for cars? We firmly believe the city exists for the people.