Universal Basic Mobility: An Introduction
Introduction
Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, made all bus, tram, and train rides free for registered residents in 2013. Making all those modes of public transportation free initiated an experiment in the spirit of a new idea called Universal Basic Mobility. The main goal of this post is to introduce the concept of Universal Basic Mobility.
To start, an abstract way to view Universal Basic Mobility is as a set of ideals designed to improve our conception of a possible mobility landscape; by mobility landscape, I mean all the possible modes of transportation available for individuals in a society. My intended audience is anyone who wants to learn more about Universal Basic Mobility, what is interesting about the idea, and how Universal Basic Mobility can provide a framework we can use to improve our mobility landscape.
Before we get deeper into my definition of Universal Basic Mobility, it may be helpful to provide some context of the significant current developments in the mobility landscape.
Mobility Context
For most of the last century, the default mode of transportation has been the privately owned car. While I believe that will continue to generally be the case, the details are shifting because we are at a turning point in the history of mobility. Some of the leading drivers of this historical turning point are environmental crises, socioeconomic inequality, and technological advancements.
These three drivers play a significant part in the shifting landscape, so we will review some specific instances where their effects are evident.
Environmental crises are forcing us to rethink how we should fuel our vehicles. This has led to heavy investment in the creation of alternative-fuel technology. We are trying to devise modes of transportation that do not harm the environment.
The depleted and insufficient state of public transportation in most parts of the United States has contributed to the widening of socioeconomic inequality. Here is a link to a good article by Jonathan English if you want to read more about it.
The rise of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) has opened up possibilities that were unavailable just a few years ago. These include businesses in the sharing economy like micro-mobility scooter rentals and ride-sharing services like Lyft and Uber.
Advancements in the internet of things (IoT) are ushering in the opportunity for the creation of smart cities.
But quite possibly, the most significant change is the possibility and promise of autonomous vehicles.
Any of these, taken by themselves, would be a huge catalyst, but the fact that they all are simultaneously happening has us right in the middle of a total mobility disruption.
Universal Basic Mobility is a vision for how mobility should look in society and undertakes explicitly to resolve two of the significant negative drivers of the mobility landscape, environmental crises and economic inequality. It attempts to provide a framework of ideals that could help lead us to a mobility future that is sustainable, fair, and works for everyone.
What is Universal Basic Mobility?
We started by describing an abstract conception of Universal Basic Mobility as a set of ideals designed to improve our conception of a possible mobility landscape. Now we will develop a narrower conception of Universal Basic Mobility as the idea that no matter a person’s socioeconomic status, disability, or location, they deserve a reasonable range of affordable transportation options that serve their needs.
There is a lot to unpack in this narrower conception of Universal Basic Mobility, so I think a reasonable way to start is to break it into two parts. The first part answers the “who” question: who will Universal Basic Mobility cover? While the second part tries to contextualize what Universal Basic Mobility means by a mobility need.
So starting with the first part: who should have access to a reasonable range of affordable transportation options, according to Universal Basic Mobility? The simple answer is everyone. But three specific characteristics: socioeconomic status, disability, and location, are mentioned, so it makes sense to go over each.
The first characteristic is socioeconomic status. This means the mobility required to satisfy human needs should be affordable. How to accomplish this is an enormous problem, but that isn’t the point here. All we want at this point is an understanding of the idea that Universal Basic Mobility envisions mobility as something affordable for everyone, even the poorest in society.
The second characteristic involves disability. Again, this stresses the idea that mobility options should consider all disabilities and provide solutions that make mobility for people with disabilities possible. We can’t build a system that leaves these fellow members behind.
The third characteristic involves location. Wherever the location, there should be a range of affordable mobility options that satisfy peoples’ needs.
There are two ways to interpret location in this context. The first is by distinguishing urban from rural. Each is going to need a range of mobility options. The tricky part is that the same options that work in one type of location may not work in another. So “no matter the location” means that the range of mobility options covers all different varieties of locations.
The second way to interpret the concept of location is from a socioeconomic standpoint. According to the ideals of Universal Basic Mobility, all locations, from the most affluent to the least affluent, need a range of affordable mobility options. Historically there has been a lot of bias in public transportation availability. For example, here is a study from Rice University highlighting the discrimination in public transportation. Universal Basic Mobility seeks to reduce this bias by stressing the need to have a wide range of affordable mobility options for all socioeconomic locations.
So to recap the first part of the narrower conception of Universal Basic Mobility, everyone deserves a wide range of affordable mobility options no matter their socioeconomic status, disability status, or location. Now let's move to the second part. What do we mean by mobility need?
Mobility need in this context is any situation where a person needs to get somewhere. That is rather vague, so maybe I can contextualize it by providing a taxonomy of the different types of trips. While I don’t expect this list to be exhaustive, we could classify most trips into one of the following five categories: work, education, healthcare, shopping, and entertainment. People need to get to and from all these different types of activities.
So if we add the first part of the narrow conception to the second part, we get: that everyone, no matter their socioeconomic status, disability status, or location, should have affordable access to a wide range of mobility options to service their mobility needs (getting to and from work, school, healthcare, shopping, and entertainment).
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you have read this far and are basically in agreement that Universal Basic Mobility represents a desirable standard for judging the desirability of a mobility landscape. However, we still have a big problem. It is a problem all utopian conceptions have. Namely, how do we move from acknowledging Universal Basic Mobility is a good idea to moving closer to actualizing it in the real world? How do we get from theory to practice?
Problematization
At the beginning of this post, I introduced the Tallin experiment in Estonia. Essentially the key idea was Estonia made all bus, tram, and train rides free for registered residents of Tallin in hopes of reducing the number of car journeys. So how has the experiment fared? Unfortunately, it did not reach its goal because it did not decrease the number of car trips in the city. So the number of residents who drove cars in the city before the free transportation did not reduce significantly after the public options were made free.
The first question I would like to ask is, why didn’t this experiment work? An obvious assumption for why it didn’t work was that the bus, tram, and train rides could not meet the mobility needs of the people of Tallinn.
The next question I have is, even though it didn’t achieve its goals, what can we learn from this experiment? The most significant learning from this Tallinn experiment is that mobility is not just a cost problem. Universal Basic Mobility cannot be achieved by just finding a way to make most current available mobility options free or low-cost. Even if we took cost out of the equation, the current state of our mobility landscape would not be able to service most people’s mobility needs. So while cost will play an essential role in resolving these problems, it is important to note that it is not the only problem.
So, where does this leave us? We would like to use the ideals of Universal Basic Mobility to reenvision our mobility landscape. But how is this reenvisioning supposed to work? Before we move to the next part, where I lay out my ideas for an evaluative framework to use when trying to bring the ideals of Universal Basic Mobility to life, it may be helpful to describe what an approach to working on the problem could look like.
To bring Universal Basic Mobility into practice, we must focus on implementing its ideals to solve particular frictions and problems and not attempt to enact a single grand vision.
Universal Basic Mobility cannot be enacted all at once. Instead, it will be an iterative and incremental process. But once we break free from the idea that the solution must be complete and instant and move to the idea that we can work by making iterative and incremental changes in the spirit of Universal Basic Mobility, we will gradually improve our mobility landscape.
So the problematization of Universal Basic Mobility is about working towards implementing the ideals of Universal Basic Mobility to solve particular frictions and problems in our mobility landscape.
A Framework
Up to this point, we have laid out a conception of Universal Basic Mobility as the idea that no matter a person’s socioeconomic status, disability, or location, they deserve a reasonable range of affordable transportation options that serve their needs. And we have problematized it by explaining its path from idea to existence involves working towards implementing the ideals of Universal Basic Mobility to solve particular frictions and problems in our mobility landscape. I thought it would be helpful to share the outline of an evaluative framework. This framework can help identify the frictions and problems in a mobility landscape. And it could also be used to envision improvements to the mobility landscape.
This framework could serve as a sort of checklist for evaluation or to question both problems (the way it is) and proposed solutions (the way it could be). The framework consists of four different categories: convenience, accessibility, sustainability, and efficiency. While I don’t claim this list is exhaustive or mutually exclusive, it can serve as a starting point for determining if a current mobility option is unsatisfactory and for attempting to find a way to implement the spirit of Universal Basic Mobility in practice.
To start, we can interpret convenience in two different ways, the first involves location, and the second involves options.
The convenience in terms of location interpretation asks questions like: are there a range of conveniently located mobility options in rural and urban environments? What about in both affluent and less affluent locations? Does accessing the mobility option involve little trouble or effort? A more future-oriented question would be: how can we make rural mobility options more convenient? All the questions in this interpretation center around asking if the location of the mobility option is convenient.
The convenience in terms of options interpretation involves comparing the available options against other possible options. For example, if a bus is available, but it only runs twice a day, that option would fail as a convenient option. This interpretation asks questions like: is this option comparable in the amount of trouble or effort as other options? Does this option occur at convenient times and convenient places? Is this option as convenient as other options is the main question of this interpretation.
Convenience should play a big part in evaluating mobility options. We want to use it to identify problematic mobility options as inconvenient and then use it as a guide in assessing new mobility options. We seek to make mobility options as convenient as possible no matter the location.
Now let’s talk about the second category, accessibility. Again, we can interpret accessibility in two different senses. The two senses of accessibility describe it from the view of disability and cost.
The accessibility in terms of disability involves evaluating if the mobility option could be used by people with disabilities. Questions from this interpretation seek to evaluate accessibility from the perspective of disability. Questions like: could someone with a hearing or vision impairment use this mobility option? Is there a way for someone who is in a wheelchair to use this mobility option? This interpretation is solely tasked with questioning if the mobility option is disability friendly. The future-oriented aspect of this interpretation looks to create mobility options that are accessible to people with disabilities.
Looking at accessibility from the lens of cost asks questions like is this mobility option able to be used by people with little money? The main question from this interpretation is whether this mobility option is affordable from a monetary standpoint for everyone. A future-oriented question for this interpretation could be: how could we make this mobility option more affordable?
Making mobility options accessible from both perspectives will be a significant aspect of many frictions while attempting to put the vision of Universal Basic Mobility into practice.
The third category in the evaluative framework is sustainability. Sustainability can also be approached from two different perspectives: the environmental perspective and the economic perspective.
Sustainability from an environmental perspective asks questions like: is this mobility option bad for the environment? What is the total environmental impact of this mobility option on the environment? What would happen to the environment if we kept participating in this mobility option? The goal of this interpretation is to find environmentally sustainable mobility options.
Next, we have sustainability from an economic perspective. This interpretation asks: Are these mobility options something a government or business could make work financially? Is there a business model where the mobility options are affordable, and a company can still profit? The main idea of this interpretation is to tackle the questions from a monetary perspective. The ultimate goal is to find mobility options that are sustainable for the environment and the economy.
The final category of the evaluative framework is efficiency. It also contains two interpretational perspectives. The first is an interpretation of efficiency from the individual perspective, which I call micro. The second is efficiency from the whole or system view, which I call macro. The questions from this category center on asking if the mobility option is efficient from a scalability perspective. So for an individual on the micro perspective, is it a mobility option that you would be able to use for the long term? From a macro standpoint, the question becomes, is this a mobility option that could be scalable throughout the system? This category acts as a sort of second-level category to check if the mobility option is scalable after it has already passed through the three other categories.
This framework is very abstract and broad. But it isn’t meant to be a complete picture of the situation. Instead, its goal is to serve as a starting point for people attempting to help in thinking about how to begin to conceptualize and solve the mobility frictions and problems we currently face in the spirit of Universal Basic Mobility.
Conclusion
Now I know we have covered a lot of ground so let’s recap everything in case I was unclear when diving into the details. First, we have the definition: Universal Basic Mobility is the idea that no matter a person’s socioeconomic status, disability, or location, they deserve a reasonable range of affordable transportation options that serve their needs. Next, we got into who that definition covers, everyone. And what it conceives of as a mobility need; a person needing to get to and from work, school, healthcare, shopping, or entertainment. Then we stressed the importance of seeing that to make headway with Universal Basic Mobility, we don’t need a complete picture. Instead, we can start by trying to work on the parts by iterating and incrementally improving isolated frictions and problems. Finally, we ended by introducing a framework to use as an evaluative checklist for thinking about mobility options; by taking into account their convenience, accessibility, sustainability, and efficiency (C.A.S.E.), we will be able to judge if they fit with the spirit of Universal Basic Mobility.
Thank you so much for reading this post, and please do not hesitate to reach out by leaving a comment. I would love to engage in a conversation. Also, if you are interested in the intersection of mobility and data, I invite you to look at some of the other 99P Labs posts.
