New sustainable mobility systems that need to be understood
The cover video belongs to this article in the newspaper El País in its section "The future is exciting." And the interviewee is Janette Sadik-Khan (Former New York Traffic Commissioner, between 2007 - 2013), so she knows very well what she is talking about.
During the last decade, the emergence of new mobility services - such as Uber, Lyft (Similar to Uber), electric scooters, shared bikes or electric scooters - have rapidly begun to transform the way people make decisions about transportation. .
Remember our article on 7 graphs to better understand bicycles in the city.
Trucking services are considered by many to be the closest analogy we have to autonomous vehicles, so understanding their impact on cities is critical to planning for the future of mobility.
Faced with these new mobility elements that come into play in cities, many users are changing traditional cars for other more sustainable options. Opinions for all tastes, with debates included, but the reality is that our cities are increasingly polluted.
Administrations need to have access to better data (We can learn more about Big Data and cities from here) on the new mobility solutions that are emerging, to develop policies and plans that help maximize the benefits of these services.
With the data, cities can measure progress toward public goals such as reducing congestion, expanding equitable access to transportation, and improving safety. Without data, it is not clear where we are going.
Information can be obtained on where and from where people travel, at what times and on what days. This can be useful for municipal authorities, engineers, and urban planners working on new infrastructure projects.
Also, for example, they can reveal how new modes of transport are affecting the way people travel… Has a new train line helped reduce traffic jams in a particular area?
Making sense of all this data is challenging, but new technology-based companies are emerging to help us better understand cities.
As an example, the startup StreetLight Data. We process trillions of geospatial data points to measure how pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles interact. Their motto… «Measure the mobility of any road or area in a few clicks»
The private sector has an important role, without its data, we are halfway there. Uber, for example, has partnered with cities to help planners manage urban growth, and last year it joined SharedStreets, a data-sharing project of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).
By the way!… The NACTO website has excellent guides on road design (in English) that can be consulted from here.
It is clear that all these new data and information accumulation systems must be accompanied by timely legislation that strongly protects users, and we already talked about this in the article about how cities monitor us.
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