As we’ve seen from the initial deployments of micro-mobility services over the past year, simply dropping a few thousand shared vehicles on the streets of an urban center will not magically solve any problems. In fact, when done without some planning and forethought, it might just make things worse. A few thousand electric scooters are likely to be trivial compared to the impact of a similar number or more of automated vehicles. Before we get to zombie AVs flooding our city streets, Toyota is teaming up with Babson College in hopes of developing some proactive solutions.
The Toyota Mobility Foundation will contribute $2 million to Boston-based Babson to study the problems of local mobility and develop some solutions. Examples of the issues that need to be addressed include the potential for increases in congestion with too many empty AVs roaming around and affordability for the many lower to middle income residents of cities. Recent studies have shown that traffic congestion in cities including San Francisco and New York has increased substantially since 2010 when Uber debuted. Meanwhile, in Detroit, an estimated 30 to 40% of the city’s residents are unbanked or underbanked.
Babson, where Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda earned his MBA, is renowned for its entrepreneurship education programs. Addressing these and the many other problems of urban mobility in ways that are beneficial to society while also being economically sustainable will require a lot of innovative ideas.
Despite the disruption that ride-hailing has caused to the taxi industry and to some degree to mass transit, none of these companies are profitable. In their respective filings for initial public offerings, both Uber and Lyft have acknowledged the substantial risk that they may never be profitable.
If mobility services are to address the societal challenges posed by traffic, safety, energy use, cost and accessibility, something more innovative than unregulated taxis you hail with an app will be required. Starting in fall 2019, Babson will develop new educational courses aimed at addressing the problems of 21st century urban mobility. Toyota and Babson will be developing and testing a range of ideas over the next two years. They plan to collaborate with selected cities to actually conduct pilot tests to see if the ideas work.
Hopefully, the results will work better than the micro-mobility “revolution” has so far.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/05/09/toyota-mobility-foundation-and-babson-college-to-collaborate-on-mobility-challenges/
2019-05-09T00:00:00+00:00