Self-driving cars are just the start. Here's how the mobility revolution plays out

Quick, name the top three problems in the world today.

If you didn’t say urban mobility, you’re hardly alone. Few people think much about getting around a metropolitan area – until you’re stuck in gridlock or your train is delayed yet again. Fortunately, a new crop of tech companies has your back.

Since the Industrial Revolution, how we get around metropolitan areas has shaped the very quality of our lives by determining where we choose to work and live. With the exception of getting more cramped and strained, the urban mobility experience has changed little in a century. But a revolution is coming in the next 20 years. The inefficiencies of congestion, pollution and parking will be conquered by such tech innovators as Google, Tesla, Uber and my company, Moovit. These companies and others are revolutionizing urban mobility in ways unimaginable only a few years ago.

To understand how this revolution is unfolding, it’s helpful to think about urban mobility as a technology stack where change is happening at the top but barely touching the lower levels. 

At the base is the physical infrastructure layer – metropolitan areas’ roads, bridges, train stations, subways, bus stops, and parking lots and garages. In older cities, the infrastructure layer hasn’t changed in decades. Compare maps of London’s streets in 1911 or the New York subway in 1948 to today’s and you’ll see little difference.

Second is the rules layer – bus schedules, speed limits, licenses, permits and prices. This layer also has been static. Driver’s licenses, parade permits and speed limits are basically the same as they were 50 years ago.

Next are the vehicles that people move around in -- mostly cars but also trains, buses, subways, motorbikes and bicycles. Notwithstanding a host of incremental improvements, vehicles are fundamentally unchanged since their inception. The original automobiles were called horseless carriages. Today they’re still measured by horsepower.

At the top of the urban mobility stack is the rider interface layer – how people consume mobility. This is where the revolution has started. In the past five years hundreds of millions of people have been using ridesharing apps on smartphones, planned commute routes via GPS, and enabled more accurate data returned to communities via crowdsourcing. Changes here will soon move deeper into the stack and unlock true value for communities and consumers alike. 

The physical layer will adapt slowly. Ultimately, changes will support express lanes and stopless junctions, enable and accommodate new vehicle form factors, and encourage smooth interfaces between personal and mass transit modes.

The rules layer will shift from static to dynamic. Gone will be the days of picking up a driver’s education handbook at the DMV or paging through city council meeting minutes to understand new transit regulations. Instead, an operating system (OS) will connect all vehicles, riders and infrastructure. This OS will encompass access rights, dynamic lane direction, junction management, pricing, payments, parking, and the interfaces between transport modes. It will determine which vehicles get to move in what spaces at what speed and for what price, who gets priority at junctions, who gets to pick up and drop off in exactly the right place. Roads will be priced and vehicles will be routed to prioritize higher density and lower emissions at particular times. Inconveniences that we accept today like congestion charges and odd/even driving days will be considered crude when smarter and more efficient programs come.

In the vehicles layer, cars will become connected, electric, driverless, and ultimately with new form factors, Some of this work already is well publicized with companies like Google, Tesla, Uber and others testing new technologies daily. Walk around downtown San Francisco or drive through Silicon Valley and you’re likely to see an autonomous car with its roof-top rotary contraption navigating the lane next to you. When this aspect of the urban mobility revolution is fully realized, people will consider mobility as a service rather than a ride in a personal car, taxi or public transit.

These tectonic changes to the urban mobility stack will be made possible by Big Data. Just like the 10-year-old kid with a smartphone has more information today than world leaders had a decade ago, cities and municipalities will access data in quantities never before imagined. Today municipalities are still conducting old-school, expensive and infrequent mobility surveys to understand what's going on in their cities. It's just a matter of time before these are replaced with sensor and smartphone-based systems that provide vastly more accurate and real-time data. This information will lead to an overall shift in all aspects of urban mobility planning and management.

Already a major player in the mobility data space, Moovit has more than 50 million users worldwide whose use of the free app gives us billions of data points every week. We combine this data with input from more than 150,000 “Mooviters” (local editors) who voluntarily map their cities by entering the longitude and latitude coordinates of every transit stop while providing real-time updates on road closures, strikes, and other disruptions to the transit system. This is a treasure trove of urban mobility data that will ultimately underpin the next generation of mobility as a service.

Big Data gathering, measurement and analysis will help the world’s municipalities in ways they could not have imagined even five years ago. It’s a fast-moving train you don’t want to miss.

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