TRANSPORTATION SPECIAL The road to seamless urban mobility  PART I

Will the coming mobility revolution make urban traffic better, or worse?

The age of modern transit began in 1863, when the first underground railway began rolling in central London. The line was short and smoky, and nothing like it had ever been seen before. But it worked, and cities around the world began to follow London’s lead. Over time, city authorities came to see providing transportation as one of their core responsibilities; governments often owned and ran transit systems themselves.

The road to seamless urban mobility

Despite governments’ best efforts, traffic is getting worse in many cities, and urban mobility has become increasingly complex. From 2010 to 2016, congestion rose in London by 14 percent, in Los Angeles by 36 percent, in New York by 30 percent, and in Beijing and Paris by 9 percent. Congestion carries health consequences, in the form of accidents and air pollution. Demographic trends—more people, and more in urban areas—will accentuate today’s strains, which aren’t solely about the movement of people. E-commerce is also growing fast, adding to the demand for urban commercial transport.

Seamless mobility could be cleaner, more convenient, and more efficient than the status quo, accommodating up to 30 percent more traffic while cutting travel time by 10 percent.

The technological changes associated with mobility’s “second great inflection point” create myriad opportunities for cities to address these challenges. As ridesharing grows up, digital vehicle connectivity deepens, electric vehicles (EVs) become mainstream, and autonomous vehicles (AVs) take hold, it becomes possible to envision a future of “seamless mobility.” In such an environment, the boundaries among private, shared, and public transport would be blurred, and travelers would have a variety of clean, cheap, and flexible ways to get from point A to point B. Our analysis suggests that seamless mobility could be cleaner, more convenient, and more efficient than the status quo, accommodating up to 30 percent more traffic while cutting travel time by 10 percent.

Today’s reality, though, is far from seamless. Vehicles that are fully autonomous do not yet exist in meaningful numbers, EVs still make up only a small percentage of the global vehicle fleet, and traditional internal-combustion-engine (ICE) cars represent about 40 percent of passenger-kilometers—often more than rail and bus services combined.

Starting from this baseline, urban-mobility systems in dense, developed cities, such as London, New York, and Seoul, could evolve in a variety of ways over the next dozen years. This article describes three potential scenarios and details how public- and private-sector leaders can forge a strategy to make seamless mobility happen. For city planners and other urban-mobility specialists, we have also prepared a longer report, An integrated perspective on the future of mobility, part 3: Setting the direction toward seamless mobility..

Three scenarios

To develop a perspective on the future, we modeled a set of short (fewer than two kilometers), medium (two to ten kilometers), and long (more than ten kilometers) trips, differentiating between trips within the city business district and trips to and from the city and the suburbs. We also simulated the trade-offs that people make—for instance, deciding between a more convenient but pricier autonomous shuttle and a less convenient but cheaper bus—and estimated how these decisions could affect congestion in 2030. Finally, we accounted for “induced travel”—the concept that when it is easier or cheaper to travel, demand tends to rise. This analysis shows that seamless mobility holds many advantages, but achieving it is far from a foregone conclusion.

Scenario 1: Business-as-usual urbanization

Imagine a world in which population growth continued, but large cities managed their transport systems largely as they do today, with little innovation in pricing or policy. Imagine further that complicated traffic patterns, setbacks in technology development, and delays in consumer adoption deterred the large-scale deployment of AVs, and that vehicles did not electrify in large numbers.

In our analysis of such a model, the results are discouraging. Transport demand would increase in line with population growth (about 15 percent by 2030), and greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions could rise proportionally. City dwellers would travel in mostly the same ways as they do now, and private cars would continue to account for about 35 percent of passenger-kilometers. Average travel times would increase by 15 percent because capacity would be strained. In the United States, without substantial change, this is the likely scenario: few cities, even the largest, have comprehensive plans that consider new and forthcoming technologies.

Scenario 2: Unconstrained autonomy

Now consider an alternative future in which autonomous-driving technology advances, but regulators and city governments don’t keep up. In other words, what if autonomous-transportation options follow in the footsteps of bikesharing programs and e-hailing, which hit the roads faster than the policies needed to guide them did?

It’s certainly plausible. By 2030, shared AVs—or robo-taxis—could navigate to, from, and within a central business district. Our analysis suggests that, at that point, they could become an attractive alternative to private-vehicle ownership, with the cost per mile of riding in a robo-taxi running about the same as the cost of owning a moderately priced private vehicle, and that travelers could adopt them for individual or shared use for about 35 percent of their travel by 2030.

Compared with the first scenario, this one has clear advantages. The partial displacement of fixed-route buses by robo-taxis with flexible routing would increase the share of point-to-point trips, reducing waiting and walking times between transfers. If the robo-taxis were electric, GHG emissions would fall and air quality improve. Congestion, however, will not improve compared with the baseline, and it could get worse. The average time for a private car trip could increase as an increased convenience of robo-taxis draws more users onto the roads. Other travelers, anxious to avoid the crowded roads, could pack into trains. In all, we estimate that average travel times would be 15 percent higher compared with today’s baseline scenario.

Scenario 3: Seamless mobility

Now for a third possibility: What if cities encourage the use of shared AVs through regulation and incentives? That would make it possible for residents to “mix and match” rail transit and low-cost, point-to-point autonomous travel in robo-taxis, autonomous shuttles, and autonomous buses easily.

Our analysis suggests that pooled AV shuttles could grab 25 percent of the market (twice as much as in the unconstrained-autonomy scenario), and private cars and privately used robo-taxis could provide about 30 percent of passenger-kilometers in 2030, compared with 35 percent for private cars today (Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1 IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

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

CONTINUED IN PART II