Tech and the future of urban mobility,
This sector offers opportunities to help people get around, but it may come with costs
It was an idea that seemed to have all the right ingredients for the tech- saturated world of 21st- century urban mobility. In 2015, a Helsinki start- up unveiled a plan for something it called “mobility- as- aservice,” or MaaS. The company, MasS Global, had an app that provides citydwellers with a digital one- stop shop for all sorts of travel options — transit, taxis, ride- hailing, bike sharing, and so on.
With Google’s online mapping function, commuters can plot the best way to get from A to B and then, through the app, procure or book the transportation modes that fit the route and the users’ preferences. MaaS Global sells monthly subscriptions, not unlike cellphone packages, that provided various combinations — up to a given number of transit trips, a certain number of ride- hailing journeys and so on; the bookings are made through smart phones. The company’s mission is, quite simply, to provide a “true” alternative to private vehicle ownership. “MaaS,” according to the firm’s website, “could be the single most powerful tool to decarbonize transport for future generations.”
The idea rapidly caught the imagination of other mobility entrepreneurs, as well as venture capital firms and transportation giants like Siemens. “We need to make end- to- end trip planning easier,” says Roland Busch, Siemens’ deputy CEO.
As of late 2019, MaaS Global had raised almost 54 million euros ($ 84 million Canadian) from investors, including BP and Mitsubishi. Its app, known as Whim, was available in Helsinki, Vienna, Antwerp, and a handful of other cities. Montreal, which won a $ 50- million federal smart city challenge, is in the process of developing its own version ( the city’s pitch included technology solutions to community mobility and local food security issues).
Even in progressive jurisdictions, municipal transit agencies have not welcomed this innovation — most don’t want to relinquish the pricing and distribution of fares to third parties — and consumers have been slow to sign on. According to a recent report by Bloomberg/ CityLab, some MaaS firms are also facing financial difficulties because the business model isn’t especially profitable, yet. “If you’re going to disrupt automobiles, one of the biggest industries in the world, it will take a bit of time,” said Global MaaS founder Sampo Hietanen.
Notwithstanding its current commercial prospects, the MaaS sector reveals much about the promise, risk and peril of digital urban mobility, which is, arguably, the single most sought- after prize in the sprawling smart city industry. Smart mobility encompasses a wide range of digital technologies and applications, from those already in wide usage ( car- and bike- sharing services, ride- hailing, transit smart cards, parking apps, electric vehicles) to those that are very much under development ( autonomous cars, buses and trucks, “smart” traffic signals, curbmapping, drone delivery vehicles, and even streets where illuminated lane pavers adjust automatically based on traffic levels detected by sensors, an idea bruited by Sidewalk Labs for its now- cancelled Quayside project).
Many of these technologies will rely heavily on artificial intelligence algorithms and densely layered digital mapping applications ( Google Maps and Waze, as well as proprietary systems being developed by car manufacturers) that mesh GPS, satellite images and cellphone signals along with a rapidly expanding collection of real- time data streams, from dynamic bike- sharing or transit maps to parking spot addresses and eventually, perhaps, even the location of unfilled potholes. Some of the granular information that drives these services will come from people moving through cities, while other tranches will be harvested from municipal agencies’ open data portals.
In some fields, there are enormous opportunities presented by the technologies that fall under the broad heading of smart mobility: more responsive traffic and transit planning; improved accessibility for groups that face impediments in moving around cities ( disabled residents, seniors, children); and better low- carbon alternatives to privately owned fossil- fuel burning vehicles.
What’s more, transportation planners now need even more precise real- time travel data in order to find ways of responding to the profound and often unpredictable pandemic- related disruptions in how people move around cities.
A case in point: over the past few years, the TTC has installed sensors on the doors of all its buses that record how many passengers are boarding and how many are exiting and send this information to the agency’s control centre. Initially intended to create periodic ridership reports to allow the TTC to adjust service levels, agency officials during the pandemic figured out how to tweak the system so it could detect, in real time, when more than 25 people are on a bus, meaning it’s too full to permit adequate physical distancing. The system generates “heat maps” showing which routes are experiencing overcrowding. TTC managers use that intelligence to dispatch buses that have been put on standby for this specific purpose.
Yet the disruptive arrival of ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft — which, pre- pandemic, fuelled congestion and eroded transit usage — serves as a warning that future market- driven mobility innovations will require scrutiny, careful policy planning and clear- eyed assessments of the costs and the benefits.
Over the past two years, new car buyers have been able to choose vehicles with safety features that hint at the dawn of a new era. Automated anticollision systems developed by manufacturers like Toyota process information from dash- cams, GPS devices, tiny radars, on- board sensors with recognition capabilities and systems that track and adjust the vehicle’s position in a lane. The automotive industry, as well as tech giants like Google, have invested billions in these kinds of innovations, and they can be seen as some of the earliest advances that may lead to fully autonomous vehicles ( AVs) — socalled “level five,” for their ability to guide themselves without a driver.
During much of the decade before the pandemic, the investment hype around AVs reflected a feverishness informed by futuristic visions of vast fleets of driverless cars, operated by ride- hailing companies. Instead of private vehicle ownership, city- dwellers could travel simply by summoning shared AVs, which would cost far less to use because there were no drivers to pay.
Some critics, however, found this image of urban mobility to be troubling and rife with questions: Where would AVs go when they didn’t have passengers? Would these services accelerate sprawl or further erode transit ridership, which has already seen drops due to the popularity of ride- hailing? What about safety? Despite all the talk about AVs being immune to distracted driving, who is responsible if a cyclist or a pedestrian is hit, as has happened in trials? And finally, are such vehicles, with their wireless connectivity, vulnerable to hacking, satellite signal disruptions or even power- outages?
Other experts point out that the pandemic has fundamentally altered the presumed uses for fleets of AVs operated by companies such as Uber or Lyft. “There are huge challenges right now with sharing anything,” says U of T geographer Shauna Brail, who studies the ride- hailing sector. Some of the big players, she notes, have slowed or closed their AV R& D operations.
Transportation technologies, moreover, can bring unintended consequences; one need only think about the earthchanging impact of the internal combustion engine to see that technical innovations have triggered profound social and ecological upheaval. But with fully automated AVs still at least a decade — and more likely two decades — away, it’s by no means clear how local and regional governments should proceed. Clearly, there will be implications to the advent of AVs, but no one really knows what a proactive policy response should look like.
But the messy, and mostly unregulated, arrival of ride- hailing offers important insights. In the early- to mid- 2010s, tech upstarts like Uber wielded the triumphant rhetoric of disruption: innovators could topple lumbering incumbents that had grown complacent, but such was the way of capitalism. After all, does anyone today fret that a very young Microsoft kneecapped IBM in the 1980s, or that Steven Jobs ruthlessly dethroned BlackBerry with the iPhone in 2007?
Yet mobility, and specifically urban mobility, isn’t just another consumer good or service; cities are defined, in fundamental ways, by their transportation networks, which create urban spaces, enable commerce, support labour markets, activate street life but also require extensive planning and public investment. The notion that mobility is a “market” isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t tell the whole tale.
Some cities welcomed Uber et al and ignored the complaints of taxi companies; others imposed regulations, banned Uber outright or sought to give home- grown ride- hailing firms a leg- up. Over time, however, the policy environment in many places has shifted, including in Toronto. According to a 2018 study conducted by researchers with the University of Waterloo’s School of Public Health and Health Systems, safety concerns relating to driver training, background checks and insurance drove regulatory action in many jurisdictions.
What’s missing from that study’s list, however, is the non- negligible impact that ride- hailing has had on transit, transportation and land- use planning. For example, a 2018 analysis published by three University of Kentucky civil engineers found that in U. S. cities, each year after the arrival of ride- hailing companies saw rail ridership fall by 1.3 per cent and bus ridership drop by 1.8 per cent. “The effect builds with each passing year and may be an important driver of recent ridership declines,” the authors conclude. Those losses translate into increased traffic and emissions, as well as accelerating operating shortfalls for transit agencies. Put another way, the profits earned by ride- hailing firms come directly at the expense of the public purse.
The Town of Innisfil, north of Greater Toronto, sought to square this circle by offering subsidized or flat- fee Uber rides as a substitute for bus service — an experiment that garnered international media attention when it launched in May 2017. The problem, as it turns out, was that residents enthusiastically embraced the offer, so much so that the town has ended up spending far more than it would have on a conventional bus service and had to impose a cap on how many subsidized trips an individual could take. What’s more, Innisfil, which plans to develop a walkable urban core over the next few decades, has seen an increase in vehicular traffic, according to some reports.
More recently, e- scooter firms like Lime and Bird borrowed from Uber’s playbook, rapidly launching their services, in some cases without seeking municipal approval. Like ride- hailing, e- scooters can be booked and paid for via a smartphone app; in some cities, they can be left anywhere, cluttering sidewalks and sowing confusion about where they can travel. Because e- scooters can move so rapidly, cities that have allowed these devices have also seen a spike in collisionrelated injuries, in some cases even exceeding those involving pedestrians and cyclists. ( In Ontario, Queen’s Park last year announced a five- year pilot to “examine their ability to safely integrate with other vehicle types and determine whether existing rules of the road are adequate.” It’s up to municipalities to choose to participate.)
Then there’s the data piece. University of Ottawa professor Teresa Scassa, Canada research chair on information law and policy, notes that Los Angeles County planners wanted to understand if dockless scooters made a dent in the so- called “last mile” problem — the final stretch between home, shopping and work where there are few transportation options other than private vehicles. As a quid pro quo, she says, county officials offered to allow the e- scooter companies to operate on city streets, on the proviso that they provide anonymized usage data for planning purposes. But the firms’ balked and appealed to state legislators for protection.
Cities’ experiences with both ride- hailing and e- scooters should sound a “warning shot” for municipal officials. “The disruption from AVs is likely to be much more substantial,” Kirsten Rulf, an analyst with the Harvard Kennedy School Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative, cautioned on Medium in 2018. “Cities and states need to move into the driver seat now to set the right course for their constituents. That is why learning from both the scooter wars and the rapid and irrevocable ( ride hailing) implementation is essential for city and state policymakers. They can avoid being on the defensive once again by acting now on AVs.”
“We’re very proactive in thinking about ( AV policy). But it’s unclear how to regulate something that’s changing so rapidly.” SHAUNA BRAIL UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO GEOGRAPHER STUDYING RIDE- HAILING SECTOR
While AVs will likely be several orders of magnitude more disruptive than either e- scooters or ride- hailing, the prospect of developing AV policy proactively serves up a classic chicken- and- egg dilemma. With the technology still under development, many governments are reluctant to act, beyond enabling AV test projects, such as pilots of automated minibuses. At the same time, AVs, once commercially viable, shouldn’t be allowed to use public rights of way in the absence of standards and regulations that govern traditional vehicles.
Which is not to suggest policy- makers aren’t thinking about AVs; many are. For example, Transport Canada, earlier this year, released a detailed “guidance” on cybersecurity for “connected and autonomous vehicles” — an acknowledgment that hackers or terrorists could corrupt these computer systems on wheels, either during the manufacturing process or while they’re on the road and operating. The guidance points out that Canada is heavily involved in international standardssetting working groups focused on harmonizing AV regulations.
At the local level, however, it’s a different story. A detailed study published last year in the Journal of the American Planning Association concluded that most cities haven’t attempted to get out ahead of the eventual arrival of AVs on local streets and highways.
MIT mobility planning scholars Yonah Freemark, Anne Hudson and Jinhua Zhao reviewed the transportation plans for 25 large U. S. cities and surveyed another 120. Few, they concluded, had begun planning for AVs. Nevertheless, many transportation officials had formed opinions about the potential consequences. “Although local officials are optimistic about the technology and its potential to increase safety while reducing congestion, costs and pollution,” the authors found, “more than a third of respondents worried about AVs increasing vehicle miles travelled and sprawl while reducing transit ridership and local revenues.”
The City of Toronto, interestingly, is an exception — one of the few large municipalities to date to have leaned into the problem of creating a local policy framework for a global technology that has yet to ripen. Approved last fall by council, the 176- page Automated Vehicles Tactical Plan aims to bridge the gap between the emerging technology and the city’s other priorities. The document is nothing if not encyclopedic in scope. It scans the state of the technology circa 2019, the commercial ecosystem in which AVs are being developed, the weave of federal, provincial and municipal regulations that apply to vehicles, potential use cases, and even the findings of surveys detailing GTA residents’ expectations about AVs.
“We’re very proactive in thinking about ( AV policy),” says Shauna Brail, the U of T geographer. “But it’s unclear how to regulate something that’s changing so rapidly.”
The plan’s main focus, explains its author Ryan Lanyon, was to force a conversation about how AVs should advance, as opposed to undermine, Toronto’s other civic priorities. These include equity and health, sustainability, privacy, integrated mobility and prosperity. “We need the technology to move us to those objectives,” says Lanyon, a senior transportation manager with the City. “The bigger question is, how does the technology get us there?” “The vision,” he continues, “has to accommodate what we want the technology to do.”
The tactical plan lays out a highly detailed menu of small preliminary steps over the next two years as a means of embarking on a much longer journey. These include measures from ensuring wheelchair accessibility on an automated shuttle bus pilot project ( it is set to begin service in the spring and will be overseen by the City, the TTC and Metrolinx) to establishing a testing “sandbox” for AV prototypes. Much of the work calls for continuing research on the development of AVs, from their impact on surface transit to the way they might circulate when unoccupied. Unstated but evident is the city’s intention not to get sandbagged again by a technology that it didn’t see coming.
Lanyon’s report was informed by a close reading of how early car adoption influenced urban histories. In cities like Los Angeles, critical decision points — e. g., the postwar move to tear up its extensive streetcar network — played a determinative role in the city’s fraught relationship with the automobile and the related problems with sprawl and air quality.
The tactical plan draws heavily on an influential 2005 analysis of the evolution of the urban transportation technology between 1860 and 1930, by University of Manchester innovation scholar Frank Geels. He set out to explore the technical and societal “transition pathway” between the horse- drawn carriage and the automobile. Lanyon says the most important lesson from Geels’ work is that there was “no critical path” that led to the dominance of the automobile; it was never some kind of foregone conclusion. Lanyon also takes the view that we’re in a similar period of transition right now. “As a society, we won’t just jump forward” to the adoption of AVs as they are currently imagined.
Geels’ narrative — which is well worth reading — illustrates just how complex that transportation revolution was. The push to rely less on horses was informed by public health concerns — too much manure on city streets — and gave way to the advent of horse- drawn taxis and then trolleys. The inventors of early private cars experimented with batteries and steam as fuel sources, and combustion engines initially didn’t catch on because they required a crank. At the same time, the late 19th- century bicycle craze gave rise to manufacturing techniques while stoking public interest in individual mobility and the use of bikes for touring. Meanwhile, cities were beginning to pave streets and replace cobblestones with asphalt as the expansion of electricity fuelled the public’s appetite for electric trams.
A Dearborn, Mich., inventor named
Henry Ford borrowed from the new bike manufacturing techniques as he developed what would become the first massproduced car. But, Geels argues, the application that really drove the popularity of private cars was that city- dwellers could take them out into the countryside to explore. It was a recreational, as opposed to practical, application that produced the demand that allowed the gaspowered private vehicle to dominate. “The success of the automobile,” Geels concludes, “was enabled by the previous transformations.”
The learning, Lanyon reflects, is that AVs will have to compete with other transportation technologies; the winner is not pre- determined just because the auto sector is sinking so much money into these systems.
Smart city watcher Anthony Townsend argues that the car industry’s muchhyped investments in AVs have diverted attention from what he feels will become more impactful applications, such as smaller, nimble autonomous transit vehicles or a range of specialized mobility devices that rely on AV navigation systems, such as bikes capable of re- balancing themselves and next- gen motorized wheelchairs. “There are so many scenarios for other kinds of vehicles,” he says. “But that’s not part of the main narrative because that’s not part of the auto industry’s messaging.”
For policy- makers, the takeaway is that it will be extremely important to keep close tabs on how transportation markets unfold in order to assess whether AVs are likely to increase congestion or exacerbate sprawl in urban regions. As Shauna Brail adds, all three orders of government need to be engaged in order to prevent or at least mitigate unintended consequences. “I think that’s really huge.”
It may be that the smart mobility revolution is actually playing out off to one side, somewhere other than on the streets and in the auto sector’s R& D labs. Case in point: over the past few years, a Google subsidiary called Coord has been busy mapping the curbs of big cities. “Curb analytics,” as the company describes this venture, involves building digital maps packed with geographical data on the locations and dimensions of “assets” like parking spaces, loading zones, use regulations, taxi stops, wheelchair accessible curb ramps, fire hydrants and so on.
“A new way to see your city’s curbs,” announces a Coord blog post, which itemizes commercial applications for this kind of data — visualizations for municipal planners to assist in figuring out the allocation of curb space, for loading, bike lanes, or pick- up/ drop- off zones. In a related venture that Sidewalk Labs planned to test in Toronto, the company would install sensors along the edges of streets to detect if a parking spot is vacant at any given moment. Such devices come with a cost, which suggests a business model and a strategy for generating revenue from them.
Even further away from the road rightofway, Amazon is testing delivery “robots” — they resemble tall, enclosed children’s wagons and are decked out with the company’s smile logo. These vehicles are designed to make use of sidewalk space as they drop off parcels in neighbourhoods. The trials, reports Mashable, are taking place in Georgia and Tennessee. No doubt the pilots of these compact autonomous vehicles are being closely watched, given the dramatic surge in ecommerce since the beginning of the pandemic. ( A home- grown version, known as Geoffrey and produced by Tiny Mile Robots, is being tested in Toronto.)
In recent months, the veteran Toronto mobility consultant Bern Grush has been working on developing international standards to be adopted by the International Standards Organization that would lay out rules for how such robots must function on strips of concrete that have long been the exclusive preserve of pedestrians.
This fast- growing family of smart mobility technologies is transforming the unhurried world of curbs and sidewalks into contested, and possibly financially valuable, spaces that are of intense interest to e- commerce, delivery and tech giants and, perhaps eventually, fleets of shared AVs, which will have wireless access to curb maps that identify parking spots where they can stop until the next ride. “We’ve never managed the sidewalk before with that complexity,” Grush says. “They all compete for space.”
Standards development, Grush observes, has raised some complex philosophical questions. “The rules apply to the machines,” he says. “I’m not contemplating anything in the standard to regulate human behaviour.” The prospect of AVs navigating sidewalks means they will interact with humans, dogs, people pushing strollers, and motorized wheelchairs, not to mention recycling bins, sidewalk detritus, snow, even dog poop. “What I am saying is that if we’re going to allow a robot on the sidewalk, that robot has to grant the right of way, it has to stick to one side. But will the robots change our sidewalk behaviour?”
It’s an interesting question. Of course, private enterprises use — and make money from — public spaces in cities all the time, from restaurant sidewalk patios to street vendors, billboards and food trucks. Their presence does alter human behaviour — where we go and what we do, whom we meet and so on.
Yet the combination of powerful digital mapping tools and different species of AVs raises the prospect of the financialization of public spaces in order to serve the interests in of very large corporations. After all, if Uber or Lyft someday operates a fleet of AVs that will need places to park between rides, access to real- time data about the location and availability of nearby parking spaces suddenly becomes a desirable commodity. Likewise, if parcel delivery companies become reliant on the use of sidewalks, it’s not difficult to imagine that they’ll eventually demand that municipalities provide more and better access, perhaps even citing data collected from those routes where they encounter obstacles, like a group of pre- teens ambling home from school and blocking the sidewalk, as kids do.
In a world where urban mobility becomes ever more digitally determined and eventually autonomous, the role of the city as the regulator of public space seems destined to become far more complicated — an exercise in weighing interests that could easily rank the desires of residents well below the demands of big tech.
This is part of the 2019- 2020 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series on the politics and governance
Toronto journalist and editor John Lorinc, will examine data and privacy, mobility applications, predictive policing, sustainable smart cities, data and planning and smart city megaprojects. It concludes with a discussion about how these systems can fit into accountable, progressive and