TRANSPORTATION SPECIAL.... The road to seamless urban mobility PART II

The road to seamless urban mobility  PART II

It’s not just autonomous vehicles that would make the difference. Intelligent traffic systems, advanced rail signaling, and connectivity-enabled predictive maintenance would all boost network reliability. Seamless mobility could improve performance on all five indicators that characterize a transit system: availability, affordability, efficiency, convenience, and sustainability. It could accommodate up to 30 percent more passenger-kilometers (availability) while reducing average time per trip by 10 percent (efficiency). It could cost 25 to 35 percent less per trip (affordability), increase the number of point-to-point trips by 50 percent (convenience), and, if AVs are electric, lower GHG emissions by up to 85 percent (sustainability).

Setting the direction toward seamless mobility

The dramatic differences in outcomes associated with these scenarios (Exhibit 2) mean that cities, the companies operating in them, and their citizens face critical choices. Logistics costs, employee productivity, and the day-to-day life experiences of urban employees and customers are all on the line. To get to seamless mobility—the most attractive but also the most complex end-state—cities must do three things well: optimize supply, optimize demand, and improve sustainability. Here’s a short list of urban transit priorities worth paying attention to.

Exhibit 2 IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Supply: Capacity utilization

Cities can enhance supply the traditional (and expensive) way—by building more roads, bridges, rail lines, and other infrastructure. But they can also do so by using their existing assets more intensively. Here are some tools they can deploy to do the latter:

·         Paving the way for AVs. Priorities for enabling AV use range from simple-sounding ones, such as ensuring that roads have clear signage and are in good repair, to others involving careful coordination at local, state, national, and international levels—such as the synchronization of insurance regulations, safety rules, data standards, and communication protocols. The latter can actually boost road capacity, because allowing AVs to communicate with one another enables them to drive closer together, meaning more vehicles can travel safely on the same roads.

·         Automating, and tech enabling, trains. Autonomous operations and advanced signaling reduce the space between train coaches, making it possible to achieve higher speeds and carry more people. This is no fantasy: dozens of autonomous trains already exist, for both metro lines and site-specific systems, such as airports. When Paris automated its oldest metro line, the average speed rose 20 percent. Trains can keep rolling more frequently through condition-based and predictive maintenance, which involve collecting performance data and using statistics to identify and fix problems before they cause breakdowns (reducing maintenance costs by up to 15 percent).

·         Deploying intelligent traffic systems. These systems minimize wait times and maximize movement—for example, through lights that sense traffic and communicate with each other, as well as dynamic lane allocation, which shifts lanes to the direction with more traffic. Such systems have reduced commuting times in Buenos Aires by as much as 20 percent, in San Jose and Houston by 15 percent, and in Mumbai by 12 percent.

·         Creating smart parking-technology networks. Such networks connect vehicles to infrastructure and inform users where parking is available, reducing the amount of time (and frustration) needed to find a space. In San Francisco and Johannesburg, smart parking has already reduced parking search times by about five minutes.

Demand: From private to shared modes of travel

Increasing supply alone won’t achieve seamless mobility. Encouraging people to shift to a widening array of shared-transportation options and moving some traffic to off-peak hours are also critical pieces of the puzzle. If people move away from driving themselves to using rail, bus, or autonomous shuttles, existing infrastructure can carry more passengers without increasing congestion—and maybe reducing it. Demand-optimization tools include the following:

·         Creating dedicated lanes for shared vehicles. If all the autonomous shuttles and buses that enter circulation travel in their own lanes, they will be faster, more attractive travel options. Cities such as Bogotá and Brussels have already found this to be the case with traditional buses.

·         Scaling e-scooters and shared bicycles. By shortening the “last mile” journey from a person’s location to a rail station, these options make rail travel more attractive. They are already correlated with increased public-transit usage in Beijing, Melbourne, and New York.

·         Changing the terms of trade. Shared- and off-peak-transportation options become more attractive when individual, peak-load options are less enticing. For instance, limiting the number of robo-taxis and taxis, by way of a licensing system, increases wait times and would make users more likely to select shared, autonomous options. Congestion pricing, in which vehicles pay to enter busy urban areas at certain times, is another option. Such pricing has already succeeded at shifting traffic patterns in London, Milan, Singapore, and Stockholm.

·         Shifting commercial deliveries to off-peak hours. Goods transport accounts for almost 20 percent of urban congestion. By allowing night deliveries, cities could take stop-and-go commercial vehicles off the streets during the day. The concept has been piloted in cities such as Barcelona and New York, reducing travel times for all users by as much as five minutes.

Nighttime is the right time: Transporting goods accounts for around 20 percent of congestion. In New York, night deliveries move around 25 percent of delivery traffic out of peak hours.

Sustainability: Congestion and air quality

Even with seamless mobility, roads would continue carrying the largest percentage of passengers and a healthy volume of freight. Improving air quality and reducing GHG emissions, therefore, means dealing with the vehicles that move on those roads. EV emissions fall sharply when they are charged with low- or no-emissions sources; they are therefore a critical part of the equation. One tool that cities can use to encourage the use of EVs is the creation of low- or zero-emissions zones. Another is to promote the electrification of shared, fleet, and government vehicles, which are used more intensively. Amsterdam has already made special citywide parking permits available for electric-car-sharing fleets, and Los Angeles International Airport recently purchased electric buses for its operations.

In our view of a seamless-mobility world, all robo-taxis and autonomous shuttles would be electric and charged by no-emissions sources by 2030. This may appear ambitious, given the baseline. Even in China, the world leader in EVs, only 30 percent of buses sold in 2016 were electric. As for cars, electric versions account for a tiny share of the global market, largely because of concerns about cost and range. However, because robo-taxis and autonomous shuttles are likely to be used more intensively and frequently as part of fleets, the total cost of ownership of an EV could become competitive with that of an ICE vehicle by the mid-2020s.

A possible dream

Achieving seamless mobility won’t be easy, but it’s not a pipe dream, because the advantages associated with it are so clear. Moreover, seamless mobility could create significant business opportunities. Our analysis suggests that by 2030, 40 percent of the transportation-revenue pool—the money that residents in dense, developed cities like New York, Paris, and Tokyo spend on transit—could be served by modes of transport (particularly autonomous shuttles, robo-taxis, and those using logistics approaches) that don’t even exist now. Seamless mobility may require new kinds of assets, such as storage and maintenance facilities for shared autonomous fleets, fast-charging infrastructure, and dedicated AV lanes equipped with vehicle-to-infrastructure communications and IT systems. All of this represents a significant new area of opportunity for infrastructure companies to design, build, and operate in and for new forms of public–private partnerships. Seamless mobility is only achievable if cities tap into the private sector’s capabilities, business models, innovations, and technologies.

Finally, the past offers hope. Cities have reimagined transport before and did what was necessary to improve the mobility, and thus the lives, of their people. Go back to that first underground railway: London not only permitted eight years of construction through one of the most crowded districts in the city, but it also established a public–private partnership and invested £200,000 in what was then a highly experimental project. “Those who devised and carried out this undertaking would be entitled to the highest praise and gratitude of the people,” noted one speaker at the ceremony to commemorate the opening. “This line was not only an honor to the country but a solid advance in civilization.” True enough then—and, perhaps, it will be true again in the future.

By Eric Hannon, Stefan Knupfer, Sebastian Stern, and Jan Tijs Nijssen

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability-and-resource-productivity/our-insights/the-road-to-seamless-urban-mobility?cid=other-eml-shl-mip-mck&hlkid=1786ba082ce04883b46e5166954d7824&hctky=1627601&hdpid=b2b6c46a-a43a-46b0-b2b3-5efcf0ac5b7a