Re-imagining urban public transport

New technology is paving the way for dramatic changes in how city dwellers get from A to B.

Robot bus

The future of urban travel is a lot like its past: public transport. But with a twist. New technology and big data will ensure various micro-mobile options – be they bikes, scooters or self-driving electric vehicles – are integrated into mass transit rail to give travellers the most efficient and cost-effectively seamless point-to-point trips.

Conspicuously absent from that future is the car. Or the car as we know it, at least. Rather than having to rely on a two ton SUV that accommodates five but rarely ever carries more than two to travel a couple of miles across town, travellers are being pushed – and pulled – towards more efficient and environmentally friendly modes of transport.

Changing how we make those frequent, short trips is likely to have the greatest impact. The 2017 UK National Travel Survey found that a quarter of all trips were less than a mile and two thirds were less than five.

With governments increasingly focused on cutting atmospheric CO2 and getting the most out of urban centres, limiting the use of car for short trips should be a priority, not least because such vehicles are enormously inefficient. On average, they are used around 5 per cent of the day. And because even when they’re in use, they’re rarely fully occupied, they have an efficiency of just 2 per cent. What’s more, they demand costly infrastructure and take up big chunks of urban real estate.

Combining data with new technologies like self-driving cars has the potential to revolutionise urban transport. Although it’s true that autonomous vehicle technology isn’t yet quite as advanced as enthusiasts had promised, it’s bound to be here in the next five to 10 years. And as it’s adopted, private ownership of cars is likely to drop away – to maximise their efficiency means self-driving vehicles will most likely operated in fleets by, say, ride hailing companies.

SmartCity infographic

Making the most of mini

The autonomous vehicles themselves are likely to be a radical departure from contemporary cars. There will be more one and two person vehicles, optimised for short journeys. In tandem, there will be driverless mini-buses, designed to carry up to eight people, for efficient point-to-point trips, typically connecting commuters with urban rail or underground systems in an expanded version of current shared ride schemes like Uber Pool.

This autonomous revolution has the potential to go two ways. It could release huge amounts of capacity and road real-estate. For instance, one estimate suggests it could cut the amount of parking spots needed in Singapore from 1.4 million to 400,000. And, in a city like Geneva, it could reduce the number of vehicles on the road to 20 per cent of today’s traffic.

Badly managed, the transition could have the opposite effect, however. 

If people were to abandon mass transit and use driverless cars instead, traffic jams would become more frequent. It’s worth noting that while Uber costs around USD2.2 per mile, self-driving cars will cut that to 40 to 60 cents per mile – which is well below what an equivalent journey costs on most public transport systems. One positive intervention would be to improve rail-based public transport. Take Singapore, where the expansion of the metro system has seen the growth of net new cars on the roads drop from 3 per cent a year ago to zero now. 

Asia's next

Demand for urban transit is only bound to grow. That’s especially true in Asia. While China has dominated infrastructure investment over the past couple of decades – its rapid transit to residents ratio has more than doubled since 2009 – in future the biggest potential for growth is in emerging market cities like Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta. These have a tiny fraction of the infrastructure of their developed counterparts, but increasingly have the wherewithal and political will to increase their public transport systems.

One type of public transport that is going to be hurt by self-driving cars is the bus. Get rid of the human driver, and point-to-point services using a fleet of smaller buses become much more economical.

But no single mode of transport will dominate city travel. An urban equivalent to the airlines’ Amadeus ticketing system will most likely evolve thanks to technology and data-sharing, though it might have to be subsidised by government. Such a system could generate a price and a route for any journey someone wants to make, using whatever forms of transportation are suitable. So it could create a trip that involves a shared bike, public mass transit and finishing up with an autonomous mini-bus, all on a single ticket at a single price.

In a few decades’ time, the urban roadscape could end up being as unrecognisable to us as the 1950s transport system was to people who had been around at the start of the century, when the horse and carriage ruled the highways. 

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Mega

Mega seeks to energise and enrich the debate over how to create a better-functioning economy and society.

Megatrends are the powerful socio-economic, environmental and technological forces that shape our planet. The digitisation of the economy, the rapid expansion of cities and the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources are just some of the structural trends transforming the way countries are governed, companies are run and people live their lives.

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