Rethinking and redesigning the cities of the future
Last Thursday I was a guest of Madrid City Hall and AEDIVE, participating in a panel discussion on the future of cities in line with technological developments such as electric vehicles and autonomous driving. On the same day Uber announced the launch of its worldwide UberOne in the city, a service that will use exclusively electric-powered Tesla Model S vehicles for customers prepared to pay a little more for clean and luxurious mobility.
The fact that the event took place in the same week that Google announced its Waymo spinoff, six years and more than three million kilometers after it was first announced, prompted me to begin my speech with a question: why does technology evolve exponentially, but the decisions that affect pollution, our health, traffic jams or quality of life in cities do so at a glacial pace?
In recent days Mary Barra, CEO of GM, has announced that within five years, her company will be totally focused on autonomous vehicles. Ford has announced it will test autonomous vehicles in Europe in 2017, NuTonomy has launched in Boston, Chris Urmson (former-director of Google’s original autonomous driving initiative) has announced his intention to set up a new company focused on self-driving, while Uber has launched a self-driving vehicles service using Volvo XC90s in San Francisco after kicking the project off with Carnegie Mellon in Feb. 2015.
In short, everything indicates that autonomous vehicles will soon be a reality, that technology is advancing at never-before seen speeds, and that the impact on mobility in our cities will begin to be noticed over the next few years.
But the key to making all this happen is changing our collective mindset regarding transport. Madrid is the fourth-most polluted city in Europe: the quality of its air depends almost exclusively on the weather. As soon as we have a few days with no wind or rain, the readings on the city’s pollution monitors soar and City Hall has to impose restrictions on traffic. We should thank the current administration running Madrid for its courage to break with the inertia of previous governments and be open about the capital’s pollution levels.
Madrid had high pollution rates in the 1970s, but successive administrations lacked the political will or courage to tackle the problem. Restrictions create delays, but they are absolutely necessary not only to alleviate the deterioration of air quality, but also to increase awareness about the problem. Measures introduced two weeks ago to cut traffic on the capital’s Gran Via main shopping thoroughfare and other central streets, have seen nitrous nitrogen dioxide levels fall in the city center by 32%. For once, City Hall is up to the task in hand: there is no room for criticism of the decision in my view.
The urban model we have known for decades is no longer sustainable. Some media recently reported erroneously that Mexico City, Paris, and Madrid had agreed to ban diesel vehicles by 2025, something Madrid City Hall immediately denied. Nevertheless, we all know that diesel vehicles should have been banned long ago, and that the only reason this hasn’t happened is politicians’ fear of taking a potentially unpopular decision that could also affect jobs.
As things stand, according to MIT’s research, electric vehicles can cover 87% of our journeys and that by 2025, that figure will be 99%. This has nothing to do with creating more charging stations: it’s due simply to progressive improvement of batteries and efficiency. The Tesla S P100D, powered by a 100 kWh battery already has a range of 613 kilometers, enough to take me from Madrid to La Coruña without stopping.
Clearly, we need to move toward more efficient use of our vehicles: 97% of the time our cars are parked, and the 3% of the time we use them, they carry just one person — 1.2 people, according to Madrid City Hall.Owning a vehicle that depreciates more than a third the moment we drive it out of the showroom, incurs taxes, insurance and parking, along with fuel used much of the time in search of somewhere to park, is an option that despite supposedly representing our individual freedom, is, in reality, paid for by the rest of society.
The idea of a society based on Henry Ford’s dream of one car per person is totally unsustainable in the 21st century. By 2018, the cost of using autonomous electric vehicles to move around a city will be the same as buying a vehicle, and will mean a change in how we think about car ownership. Using infrastructure that combines high-capacity public transport with shared vehicles of various sizes (taxis and minibuses, optimized by apps), it is possible to move the same number of people around using just 3% of the vehicles previously required, according to data from the International Transport Forum. In addition, traffic circulation is more democratically spread out.
Parking is another issue that needs urgent reconsideration. Eliminating street parking frees 20% of the space between sidewalks and roads for other uses (bicycles, delivery, collection and arrival of passengers, etc.), and urban space is a precious asset. Allocating sidewalks to park vehicles is an absurd waste of space, and must be subjected to increasingly stringent restrictions in order to discourage it. We cannot afford to allow some city residents to hog a space that is for everyone. Eliminating the traffic derived from people searching for a parking space reduces by 23% the amount of kilometers a typical driver covers in 24 hours, and 37% in rush hour. Better yet, it eliminates 34% of the resulting emissions.
Likewise, our taxis, which spend most of their time driving around looking for a fare, are equally unsustainable and is an approach that belongs to the last century. In the city of the future, when we want a taxi, instead of raising our hands, we’ll use an app, the vehicle will be electric and autonomous and, if we wish, one we can share with other users, allowing us to use our journey time usefully.
The problem is that very few cities are anticipating the disruption that is going to take place within our transportation systems, but anticipation is absolutely fundamental if we are to capitalize on the benefits it can bring. We expect our cities to be accessible, safe, ecological, affordable, equitable and inclusive, but technological development is not enough to guarantee that. Technology is neutral, and what we do with it depends on the use we put it to.
However, we are not out of the woods yet: there are two possible outcomes to electric and autonomous vehicle technology. One is the utopia that many imagine, where people largely share or hire vehicles, as well as using bicycles, electric motorcycles or simply walk.
The dystopian city of the future is one in which the streets are filled with electric and autonomous vehicles owned privately, given their ever-lower costs.
A study I carried out with Gildo Seisdedos that we presented at IE Business School in February, “Upgrading Urban Mobility”, emphasized the importance of three variables: ACCESSIBILITY (on demand pooling), ENERGY, (progressively greener) and INTEGRATION (intermodality or multimodality through the use of apps like Citymapper or Moovel to plan journeys using different modes of transport).
It is absolutely essential that the resources freed up by the use of technology, road space, etc., is managed by city halls and local councils with the greater good in mind. This means more restrictions on parking, circulation and pollution, as well as making more clean and shared transport available so as to generate a change in our thinking and that discourages us from using private vehicles while creating opportunities to develop other options.
We have to make sure that the sidewalks of the cities of the future will not be packed with rows of vehicles hogging a public space that could be put to other uses, nor will their roads be clogged with privately owned cars, because they will be banned from entering urban centers. Instead, we will travel around on efficient public transport systems, based on the idea of a service, not a product, complemented by bicycles and electric scooters, along with capillary networks using on-demand pooling services accessed by apps.
More and more cities are planning for a future that excludes privately owned cars. But in the meantime, as long as there is no political will and most of us are still unaware of the urgent need for drastic measures, we will continue to sit in traffic jams, breathe unbreathable air, and put up with ever-poorer quality of life. Implementing change requires us all to understand that technology could usher in an era in which mobility and cities are completely and radically reconsidered.
(En español, aquí)
