Multimodal mobility and collision courses
As new ways of moving around cities develop, the signs are that the concept of multimodal mobility, the use of different modes or means of transport for a single journey, is going to be one of the best ways to combat the inefficient use of private vehicles, far and away the reason our cities are gridlocked in endless traffic jams and subjected to increasingly worrying levels of pollution.
The development of multimodal mobility apps that combine public and private transport options with fleets of vehicles such as bicycles, shared electric cars or electric scooters, is increasingly creating a market where several companies are competing: Citymapper, Moovel or Cowlines, among others, are expanding to new cities as they manage to obtain data from a significant number of players involved in the movement of people, while competing with more generalist map services such as Google Maps and Apple Maps.
Google, which acquired Waze in June 2013 to enhance social input into its maps, has just announced multimodal journey information will be available on Google Maps in more than 80 cities around the world: using a separate tab, people can design trips made up of different forms of transport, factoring in traffic delays, train and bus departure and journey times, as well as how long walking might take: all included in the estimate of the total journey time.
Apple Maps, after a false start in 2012 that led Tim Cook to apologize and even recommend as the services of its competitors as an alternative, has slowly but consistently been improving its transit services in an increasing number of cities, now 66 worldwide, but taking great care of each city and working with a level of detail and supervision that, according to many users and analysts, is an improvement on Google Maps’ ability to plan multimodal trips.
In a city like Singapore, from where I write this, the integration of different modes of transportation is subject to clear priorities: firstly, a well-looked after, clean and sizeable public transportation system, along with fleets of bicycles and scooters of all types throughout the city managed by different companies and whose users leave them in places where they do not get in the way, and above all, a car pool with a fixed limit of vehicles: you can only buy a car if someone else takes another off the road, and at prohibitively high registration costs. Street parking is banned in much of the city, which is bristling with cameras to check that drivers have paid their hefty tolls. The result is a city in which only around 12% of inhabitants (and falling) have their own car, where you can walk, take a bicycle or a scooter, or use quality public transport hassle free, and all coordinated by transport apps.
Possibly, the multimodal transport apps today are in full collision course with giants such as Google or Apple, in a scenario that reminds a lot of what happened with areas such as comparators of purchases, hotels or travel. The next battle in the field of multimodality is the integration of ticketing: being able to request and pay transport tickets from the smartphone, group them in flat rate systems as Whim does in the case of Helsinki, or integrate managed payment methods from the smartphone to provide flexibility to the occasional user. Again, a battle in which the creativity and speed of movement of independent apps is contrasted, against the size, implementation and bargaining power of the technological giants.
For city officials, it is time to understand that the key is to open your hand to allow as many options as possible to move around the city, allocate space for them at the expense of the space currently allocated to the circulation and parking of private vehicles, and above all, require that the data of all kinds that these fleets of vehicles generate be shared with anyone who requests it and wants to offer them to users, along with those managed by the city halls, so they can efficiently plan their journeys in the city.
Leaving private vehicles to marginal uses implies precisely that: marginalize them, redesign cities in many cases originally designed around the automobile, and allowing other options, such as bicycles, kick scooters or pedestrians to can gain space at its expense. To manage this new mobility, which is already becoming the preferred option in younger generations who do not seem to show too much interest in owning a car, we will see the importance of applications designed to organize this multimodality in the best possible way, trying to add value to users, giving them as much information as possible about their journeys and about the emissions they have avoided, and extracting at the same time the information that can allow city officials to coordinate and plan the necessary resources.
It is too soon to know if the main players in this field will be the giants of the network or much smaller and specialized companies. But if something is clear is that, in the urban mobility of the future, multimodal apps are going to play a significant role.
(En español, aquí)
