If you can’t move, you can’t live
Mobility is a multi-billion dollar problem. It recently has been a word at the center of billions of dollars in acquisitions and infrastructure proposals, however, it has always been one of the most fundamental human problems: how do you get from point A to point B? How do you do it efficiently and easily? The ability to do so heavily dictates our lifestyles, especially when considered in conjunction with housing. While housing (shelter) is an obvious survival need, it’s not as directly clear why the ability to move is so important.
Consider this: you live four miles away from the nearest school, as this is the only affordable place for you to stay. You know that an education is incredibly important to open up doors to better work, higher income, and new perspectives to think about your life and the world, but how do you get there? If you have access to a car and there are roads, this is easy. If you have access to a bus or subway service and you can pay for fares, this is easy. If you have access to a bicycle or moped, this is easy.
What if you don’t? Now you’re walking an hour each way, every day, to receive an education. I’m sure we’ve all heard the “back in my day, I walked four miles through the snow uphill in both directions” stories — but without mobility options, this is a literal reality (besides the uphill in both directions). Inclement weather can completely shut down your ability to move. The lack of paved road or at the very least a footpath completely shuts down your ability to move. You can no longer get your education.
Now, what if this isn’t even about education and other means of creating future opportunity? What if you need to commute to some type of employment opportunity just to survive? What if you have a severe lack of access to healthy, nutritious food (aka food desert, a very real problem in many urban areas)? What the job market in your area isn’t working out, but it’s too expensive for you to move somewhere with better prospects? In these circumstances, which are real problems faced by millions and millions of people around the world, lack of mobility options is a direct existential threat.
Even if you have some kind of mobility — for example, you lease a car and drive to work — mobility restrictions severely reduce your lifestyle freedoms. If freeways suck (Socal’s 405 is an infamous example, I-96 in our own backyard is not so great either), what should be an hour of commuting every day easily becomes two and a half. That’s an extra hour and a half every day that you could have instead used to cook, clean, work out, study, do your hobbies, spend time with friends or family, etc., that you don’t have anymore. How much more productive would the world be if millions of people had an extra hour or two every day? How much more would get done and how much less stressed would we be? Not to mention the carbon dioxide emissions generated by millions of vehicles stalling in gridlock every day worldwide, which as I hope you’re aware, contribute massively to an imminent environmental crisis.
Bottom line: mobility is important. Your ability to get to where you need to be is one of the most important parts of your life that beyond some frustrations, you may not have given a lot of thought to.
The good news is, there are a lot of very, very smart people who have given a tremendous amount of thought and work to designing mobility solutions. I got to hear a few people talk at the 2017 Ford NAIAS Smart Mobility conference, and there are some seriously captivating ideas floating around. The bad news is, it’s complicated. Very complicated.
One of the ideas that you’ve certainly heard about are self-driving cars. The idea is that with smart algorithms, traffic can become a lot more efficient, leading to fewer jams and faster commutes. But that alone isn’t enough. One idea proposed at NAIAS expanded on the basic premise of autonomous driving, and recommended modular autonomous cars that can connect and disconnect to each other while moving. This would allow for multiple passengers to depart from separate locations, connect to form one moving unit for shared parts of their trips, such as on a major freeway from the suburbs into the city, and then disconnect while entering the city before being dropped off at various office locations. Pretty cool!
And while we’re at it, why restrict the traffic grid to two dimensions? In order to fully utilize space, the traffic grid needs to go vertical. Subway systems are already in place in many major cities around the world, moving millions of people daily underground, but there is tons of untapped potential in a suspended, quasi-aerial network. The Detroit People Mover is a solid example of how elevated cars could move passengers across vital points in a city, but it’s frankly underdeveloped.
China has been playing with the idea of a type of subway which hovers over the highways and thus bypasses traffic jams. Uber (which in itself is really a mobility company) apparently wants to get into flying cars sooner rather than later. The list goes on.
But at the end of the day, these high tech solutions aren’t going to come soon enough to address the fact that 70% of the global population is projected to live in urban areas in 2050. Some countries will have 90%+ of their population living in urban areas (Argentina, for example, already does). We need practical solutions, and we need them now, while these other high tech answers are still being developed.
While visiting China, I noticed that mobility options in Beijing were really impressive. I didn’t see a single traffic jam on a major road while in the capital city, which is at the heart of a greater municipality home to about 22 million people. Metro-Detroit is home to 4.3m people and I-96, I-275, and I-696 jam daily. How do they do it?
Highway infrastructure: 10- and 12-lane highways common; Highway and traffic engineers have done a lot of research on how speed limits, number of lanes, and lane width affect traffic flow, etc. It might not be feasible for most cities to develop this level of highway infrastructure, but it seems like adding lanes historically hasn’t done a lot for jams. Underpasses allow pedestrians to cross major roads at any time without ever stopping the flow of traffic.
Taxi: Taxi and Didi (basically Chinese Uber; acquired Uber China) are very easy to get. Motorized rickshaws are around too, but less common.
Moped: Very common option, I didn’t really see any motorcycles. Dedicated bike/moped lane is safer and allows separate traffic flows. Most mopeds are electric now, which reduces noise and carbon pollution.
Bikeshare: Most people don’t own bikes anymore. Bikesharing services like Ofo, Bluegogo, and Mobike are cheaper (Ofo is 0.5 RMB~=8c USD/hr, Bluegogo/Mobike are 1RMB~=16c USD per use for unlimited time). You unlock the bikes using the app and can leave them anywhere. They’re pretty much ubiquitous and make short to mid distances very easy to traverse without even needing to own or store a bike. And, the bike lanes on roads are huge.
Bus: Extensive bus system with buses running every 10–30 minutes. They use the same fare card as the subways, so all your public transit is paid from one place with is super convenient. Cash works too.
Subway: Extensive subway system with trains running approximately every 2 minutes.
While it may not be practical to ask for all of our highways to be 8- to 12-laners, most US cities’ public options are either dismal or non-existent (e.g. LA, Detroit). And certainly none of them make truly effective use of existing surface space. There are some concerns about sustainability and bikes left in obscure places with Chinese bikesharing, but with proper regulation and etiquette, this is one of the most innovative and feasible mobility options I’ve seen. American bikeshare by comparison is incredibly underdeveloped.
Of course, I haven’t done a ton of research on the Beijing transportation system and I’m sure it’s got plenty of problems of its own. Copying everything Beijing is doing isn’t necessarily the best option, but they’re doing something noticeably right that no American cities are.
I hope that I’ve been able to explain why mobility is so important, and why the urgency of this problem is going to increase rapidly in the near future. Continued creativity and innovation are going to be critical in realizing the city of tomorrow; until then, we need to act now and begin implementing what we can in order to both improve the lives of today’s citizens and smooth over the transition.
Something to think about on your next morning commute?
