These disruptions are giving rise to five key system issues, which will determine the direction of mobility as an economic system and a social infrastructure in the next five years and beyond.
Converging mobility platforms
Just as Amazon evolved from selling books to selling everything, mobility players are racing to become platform businesses, leveraging direct customer relationships to sell a wide range of related solutions (both owned and resold from third parties). A number of different routes are being pursued.
Didi and Uber, the most valuable and furthest-progressed of these platforms, each began with a disruptive ride-hailing service and has since leveraged its customer base, infrastructure and cash flow into a wide range of other solutions, including bike sharing, buses, food delivery, and the development of autonomous and airborne mobility solutions.
Another example is CityMapper, which began life as a multimodal wayfinding and information service. It has now diversified into providing shuttle services on a trial basis in an area of London identified as being poorly served.
Finally, the Whim service by Transdev and MaaS Global integrates access to many different transport modes — personal, shared and mass — into mobility-as-a-service subscription bundles (paid monthly).
As society seeks more efficient and effective mobility solutions, entrepreneurial mobility startups are powerful agents of innovation and change. Their comparatively asset-light, flexible models and profit motive result in precise prioritization of the most profitable zones, and deprioritization of costlier areas.
At a microeconomic level this is an entirely rational outcome. Private services take over from public services where they can sustain themselves commercially, leaving uneconomic/market failure services as public goods. In most cases, the volume of new mobility trips is contributing to the management of rising urban mobility demand in areas where public transport is weak.
However, in cities with well-developed public transport, future growth in new mobility services could materially damage the volume and economics of heavy, largely fixed-cost public transport systems — creating an additional funding gap for governments to manage. For example, a 1% decline in Transport for London’s (TFL) fare revenue is on the order of £50 million per year.1
As private mobility services scale, careful consideration of the rules and obligations attached to their participation is necessary.
Ensuring public good reaches beyond urban areas
For the same reasons as above, new mobility development to date has been heavily concentrated in dense, superurban centers (see Figure 2). While important, these areas represent only a small part of the latent mobility needs and challenges facing the overall population.
