Trusting mass transit in a post-pandemic world
A couple of days ago, while trying to enjoy my morning cup of coffee and drown out the screams of a hungry two-year-old, my memory pulled me back into what busy mornings used to sound and feel like in midtown Manhattan.
It’s been about a year since we moved. Still, I couldn’t help but remember how I rushedly used to take the Q train from 7th Avenue to Times Square or grab the 2 or 3 from Grand Army Plaza, and one of the few things that could set my week right was grabbing a much-needed cortado from Zibetto’s Espresso Bar at the corner of 6th Avenue and 48th.
The thought conjured up a smile, and I couldn’t help but wonder when my family would feel comfortable enough to revisit some of our favorite places and travel around NYC.
No one I know has particularly fond memories of using Manhattan’s notorious subway. Still, mass transit in such an overwhelming city gave our family almost limitless options to enjoy the metropolis that is New York City.
It got me thinking during Melbourne’s recent lockdown about how our fear of infection has killed our desire to use mass transit, as working from home became the new normal in six months. According to MIT, these fears were not unfounded as the city’s subway system was a significant disseminator, if not the primary source, of COVID-19 during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic.
That being said, with a soon-to-be-approved vaccine near mass availability in early 2021 right here in Australia, it’s hard to ignore the corrosive effects the pandemic has had on the global transport economy. It got shook to its core not because of labor strikes, lack of raw materials, or even an environmental protection plan, but rather because we couldn’t see the crippling effects of what was to come.
People began staying in their local communities, walked or rode their bikes to the shops more, traveled in their car only when they needed to, and focused on making working from home, work.
But is this sustainable? Can global economies afford to let mass transit systems become an anachronism like tram cars? Without a doubt, no.
Even with a vaccine, the pandemic has forced us to pay excessive attention to how we interact with others in communal spaces, and how those micro-interactions can influence massive macro changes in our society, good or bad. But that’s where the power of technology truly comes in.
I believe a significant part of the solution lies in the rising impact of emerging hardware and software products, creating a much-needed bridge between pre-2020 travel security measures and a contactless future. Here’s how some great companies and cities today are already doing the work.
MaaS (mobility as a service) at scale:
Israel has become a mega-hub of next-generation innovations. From autonomous vehicles to predictive IoT sensors, they have churned out over $35 billion worth of technologies set to change how we live now and in the future. Even still, the pandemic forced them to review how to improve single-occupancy rides and inefficient, fragmented public transport, which traditionally resulted in traffic jams, high levels of pollution, and poor access.
The somewhat overnight result? A pilot program where users entered their destination into an app and a range of options such as car or bike sharing, bus, train, taxis, or car rental, as well as a combo of these options, were offered for a timely arrival. The suggestion was based on an on-demand transit routing algorithm that calculated each passenger’s most efficient journey and routed buses accordingly.
I know you’re thinking ‘not possible,’ right? Way possible, it seems. Israel didn’t just do this when it mobilized 176,500 responders for the national effort to fight COVID-19. They evolved a traditional, inefficient system into a safer mode of transport-on-demand service. If more city centers took this approach, commuting into a busy city might not seem so frightening.
It’s use cases like these that remind me initiative remains one of the most impactful accelerants towards achieving change.
Contactless everything: Well, maybe not everything, but when it comes to payments, station entrances, and exits, this is no longer optional — it’s a must. Cities worldwide are accelerating efforts to implement touchless payments in their transit system, with Brussels recently launching contactless terminals across its entire metro network. Visa and Cubic have launched open payment solutions in cities like London, Miami, New York, Sydney, and Vancouver, making it easier to get around by tapping to pay with contactless solutions on rail and bus systems. It’s worth noting that cities like Melbourne transitioned to touchless payments pre-covid, which has helped manage the infection risk level of mass transit in the region.
Microtransit goes mainstream
With buses and trains running at suboptimal levels, cities like Abu Dhabi, Berlin, and Palma de Mallorca, Spain, have provided on-demand transit, also known as microtransit. Microtransit operates like a typical ridesharing service, but technology companies offer the booking and routing benefits for transit organizations. It opens up a safe alternative for transporting senior citizens to pharmacies or doctors to hospitals and an opportunity for contact tracing information to be collected.
According to Jerome Mayaud, lead data scientist with microtransit company Spare Labs, “Imagine Uber and a city bus had a baby.”
Robot-powered cleaning
In Hong Kong, the VHP robot ( Vaporized Hydrogen Peroxide Robot) sprays a hydrogen peroxide solution, atomized to a specific concentration, that deep cleans and decontaminates train compartments and stations. The robot ensures disinfectants get into even the smallest gaps that are otherwise difficult to reach during the regular cleaning process. This process can eliminate viruses and bacteria, and with the onset of COVID-19, I imagine we’ll see more robotic helpers wherever public contact is unavoidable.
Thermal monitoring & contact tracing
This one is a no-brainer but finding technologies to trust is what will matter. For instance, if there’s a glitch with a thermal monitoring system at St.Pancras, London, or Grand Central, NYC, the cluster exposure could be explosive. St. Pancras alone sees 149,000 people pass through it every day. Solutions created by companies like Healthe Inc, Oloid, Midas Touch, and Flir are gaining rapid traction as a mitigant for managing infection risk on public transit platforms.
When you add the power of ‘the cloud,’ they can become part of a reliable infrastructure to ensure public safety.
Passio Technologies provides innovative, modular, and customizable technology solutions for transit customers in the university, municipal, corporate, healthcare, aviation, residential, and hospitality industries. It added a contact-tracing module to its line of products, the firm’s newest tool for transit firms to use in the fight against pandemics. The program’s reporting system collects rider data from ID scans, letting transit agencies know which other cards were swiped on or off during the same timeframe. Solutions like these give public transit organizations the means to initiate a massive revamp to move towards a pandemic-tolerant future.
I can’t say for sure these technologies will get us out of our houses and back to work, make us feel more secure, or even be worth the major investments required to get them instituted on a national level.
Our fear of infection is not just the human instinct for self-preservation kicking in, but also our concern for becoming a carrier agent to our most loved ones.
What I can say is on mornings like these, when toddler screams are the current playlist and getting that much-needed boost of caffeine is non-negotiable for getting on with life, I think of my NYC morning rush and hope sometime soon, I get to have a much-deserved visit to Cafe Zibetto. Not in a rush, but with a few moments free of pandemic jitters, to fearlessly take the missed experience in.
