While preparing a Business Case for a Master Program I found a lot of articles around Uber and the Self-Driving cars. But there was one that I considered really interesting: “The Third Transportation Revolution” by John Zimmer, Lyft cofounder. In his article he exposes how the self-driving cars as a shared service can not only improve our lives but also change the way cities are designed. And he adds some really interesting and enlightening data about it.

I agree that self-driving cars will become a reality and improve the transportation. But in these lines I would like to challenge Zimmer’s vision of the Third Transportation Revolution with three key questions, and outline why the Communications Industry can unleash an alternative revolution.

Those parking machines that reshaped our cities

Through John’s article I found three key enlightening ideas:

• The average vehicle is used only 4% of the time, remaining parked the other 96%. This combined with the fact that 30% of cars in a city are driving to find parking at any given time, makes cars an inefficient transportation mechanism.
• The high cost of buying, maintaining and driving a car. As I needed to change car recently I have done the calculations myself, and the total cost of the car per month (including insurance and maintenance and excluding gas) is higher than what my wife and I spend on food!
• How cars have reshaped the cities we are living and how we could reshape our cities for the people, for the better, if the cars were shared by all the people and working at all the time.

These three key insights made me realize that if purchasing a car doesn’t seem like a great idea, there is a great space for disruption.

Question #1: What are people really purchasing?

Doing a quick overview of what people really purchase when they purchase a car, I could outline three levels:

• Some people purchase Utility: just a more convenient or faster way to get to work, school, family places…
• Some people purchase a symbol of Freedom to move wherever they want whenever they want it.
• And some other purchase an Extension of their own self, meaning status, luxury, beliefs.

At a first glance, it feels that the closer it gets to Image, the more people will be willing to pay.

If we envision the Lyft or Uber experience with a self-driving car, let’s see at which level it can be positioned.

Freedom. In an Uber or Lyft ride the user is basically driven to the place she wants to go and I expect that in the best way. And the user generally will need to wait, even a little, for an available car to arrive. There are several benefits of this: the ride can be more efficient, she can reuse that time to do other things instead of driving, and she won’t lose time looking for a parking slot. But the fact that the user is not completely in control of when the car will arrive, how she is being driven, the route she is being taken, the lanes she is using, or changing course in the middle quick and easy, can affect the perception of freedom.

Extension. Initially Lyft and Uber don’t seem to position themselves in the Extension or Image space. If crafted appropriately, they can add extra features as exclusivity, personal treatment, customization, premium car selection… With these the experience can be redesigned to become an extension of one self.

But the key challenge is when those cars are meant to be shared: the more people share a car, the less freedom or luxury a single user perceives, therefore affecting the perception of value.

Why is this question important?

Because I think this question poses two key challenges to the Third Transportation Revolution:

1. It requires a shift of paradigm. John Zimmer exposes that millennials are starting to see cars as an unnecessary expense instead of a symbol of freedom. But on the other hand I can see and read a lot of millennials looking at Tesla cars as part of their beliefs, as an extension of their image, and as a car they would buy when they can afford it.
2. As utility budgets are lower, it requires a massive part of the society to shift the paradigm in order to sustain a business that can drive this revolution.

Question #2: Is it an incremental or transformational improvement?

It has been said that you need to build a solution that performs at least 10 times better than the closest substitute if you want to make a real transformation in an industry. Following this logic let’s assume that the service needs to reduce the traffic by 10 to make a transformational impact in cities.

With this in mind I started to think on different scenarios:

• What if all people would be driven by their self-driving cars to their personal route instead of driving their cars... Self-Driving cars will surely drive better, use better routes and coordinate better to minimize traffic. Taking the data that 30% of time cars are driving looking for a space to park and adding the other factors of traffic optimization that the self driving cars industry commonly exposed (as can be seen here), we could be reaching traffic improvements from 2 to 3 x.
• What if all people would be driven in shared self-driving cars to their destinations instead of driving their cars... Let’s make the best-case assumption that most people go on their cars alone now and with these services all cars will be shared by 4 people average (due to the size of the cars). We can then be talking of improving four times the previous ratio, this means a 8-12 time reduction of traffic in the best case scenario. But as John says population in cities is expected to grow, I think we will still be below the transformational threshold.
• What if all people would be driven in the most adequate vehicle according to the amount of people sharing it... Here I can imagine a service that for a solo ride uses a small individual car (like a Renault Twizy), for a ride of two a Smart and that way all along to vans and buses. Or even I can imagine a world where cars can be modular and can mount themselves to be the perfect fit for a specific ride. At this point I believe we can overcome the 10 x barrier despite the predicted increase of population.

Why is this question important?

• Because just making all cars autonomous is probably not going to make the transformational change required to reshape the cities. We need to add to this that all estimations say that in the beginning self-driving cars will make traffic worse until all cars are connected in a V2V way. This can prevent the service to cross the chasm, depending on how the experience improves for the early adopters or how regulation impacts the game.
• Because it may need a big and diverse fleet of vehicles to have the enough amount of cars of all sizes to optimize traffic or redesign vehicles themselves to reach the optimal size for each ride in an efficient way.

With all these points, I think self-driving buses with intelligent routing will become a reality, taxis will be replaced by or transformed into self-driving car services and transportation of goods will be done by self-driving trucks. But for me is still an open question if Uber and Lyft are really going to provide the transformational improvement in our world in 2025 to reshape our cities.

Perhaps there is another angle that can provide a more transformational improvement.

Question #3: Is it really addressing the Core Needs?

Then I started to look at the challenge with another lens and realized that the underlying problem to be solved is not how people move, but the fact that most people want to move to similar places at the same times. Why do people want to live in similar places? Why do they want to move to other places? And why at the same time?

If we start to dig into these three questions we can see things as:

• Work schedules of most of the people are very similar so we can coordinate personal and professional lives
• Children schedules are very similar and in sync (more or less) with the working schedules so parents can handle them.
• People want to live in the same places because they want to have more options: better job opportunities, more entertainment capabilities, better education, meet more people or be closer to people similar to them…
• People need to move every day because jobs, education, entertainment, goods and homes are distributed in different locations to optimize different variables.

… and more and more things that sociologists, anthropologists, city planners, environmental agencies and many great people have studied more than me. Things that affect multiple dimensions of our lives: work, education, family, entertainment, social relationships, health, supplies.

The Self-Driving Car revolution is solving the how we move but not the why we need to move

Then, when looking at a vision for 2025, should we then focus on making the Third Transportation Revolution? Or should we really join efforts in approaching the final one: The No Transportation Revolution?

The No Transportation Revolution

Looking at the list of dimensions in the previous point I realized that there was one common key industry supporting them: Communications Services. Key players in this industry can:

• Create 10 x better communication services that facilitate people to live and work in different places, and with the same level of efficiency and effectiveness.
• Apply those capabilities to distribute education, making learning together and from others a reality without requiring long commuting times.
• Develop broadband infrastructures that act as a lever for Virtual Reality and Group Virtual Reality to enjoy any spectacle in the world even with your friends, colleagues or family.
• And with these previous points allowing people to redefine communities, decentralizing cities, while strengthening the bonds of people in small communities without requiring long commuting times.

Reducing the need to move, a cascade-disruption effect can affect different industries and actually create the No Transportation Revolution. If we don’t even need to use any car, we can reshape the world for the people, for the better.

This doesn’t mean that self driving cars will not become a reality. As I mentioned, I can foresee most vehicles being self driven in 2025. But if we join our efforts in disrupting why we move, perhaps we can build a 2025 where most people don’t even need cars, buses or cabs. This is the No Transportation Revolution.

Which revolution would you like to join?

Any data, references and improvements to these words are more than welcome, so please share your thoughts!