IT illusions: the case of transport

The future of the car is Mobility as a Service (MaaS)? That’s a chimera

In his 1954 detective story The caves of steel, Isaac Asimov wrote of a New York City that ran on high-speed sidewalks. But today urban mobility is about mobile payments, not moving pavements. For every Elon Musk, a thousand experts betray conceptions of mobility that are surprisingly static – when they’re not, quite literally, incredible. Steering between these two extremes, designers will now have to try to propagandise, among their clients and the public, for the kind of genuine leaps in transport progress that took place 100 years ago.

What’s trendy is Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Uber and Siemens, plus early-experimenter cities (Helsinki, Barcelona, Copenhagen), advocate this in Europe through the MaaS Alliance. The ostensible idea is that transport operators provide, through various juicy business models, an alternative to the private car. A single app would book and pay for a door-to-door mix of public transport, ride-, car- or bike-sharing, taxis, and the renting or leasing of cars.

A future seen through IT spectacles distracts from the West’s need to invest radically to overcome crumbling infrastructure. Traffic congestion is to be solved not by building anew, but rather through a frictionless, IT-assisted alignment of transport supply and demand. In Britain’s civil service, a roundtable at the Department for Transport hopes that MaaS will suppress vehicle ownership and ensure behaviour change; it fears, however, that MaaS might encourage more transport use, rather than ‘self-powered journeys’.

Beancounters Deloitte are brighter. For them MaaS eventually means fully autonomous, shared-ownership cars. IT companies will make the running more than carmakers, regarding the vehicle as just another platform in a multi-device world. Indeed, the ‘in-vehicle transit experience will increas­ingly be a defining feature of the future of mobility’. So pay attention at the back, car designers! You’ll be tasked with putting together ‘even more immer­sive and interactive’ customer experiences based on ‘high-quality content creation, effective content sourcing, targeted advertising and product placement’.

For McKinsey mobility is more electric. By 2030, self-driving cars in London, Chicago, Singapore and Hong Kong could exceed 40 per cent of the total, and electric vehicles, 66 per cent. PricewaterhouseCoopers? For it mobility by car in 2030 isn’t just electrified, autonomous and shared, but also connected, a ‘third place’ between home and work, and subject to annual hardware and software upgrades.

Plenty of work for consumer electronics and interior designers here – if, that is, Ford and BMW meet their target of mass-producing fully autonomous vehicles for ridesharing by 2021. If, as Deloitte says, up to 80 per cent of passenger miles travelled in urban areas could by 2040 be in shared autonomous vehicles. If, too, Deloitte is right that airborne, anywhere-to-anywhere ‘revolutionary vehicles’ will arrive by 2025 – pilot-driven or autonomous vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) machines taking 2-5 passengers distances of 200 miles or more, each a hybrid of passenger drones (65 mile quad- or more-copters, due for launch 2018-20) and cars with addable/detachable wings (200 miles, launch in 2020-22). And, get this: such flying cars are envisaged as being electric.

But those are very big ifs. Car-sharing, worldwide, bounded up from 350,000 in 2006, through 5 million in 2014, and might reach 23 million in 2024. So with perhaps two billion cars on the world’s roads in 2030 or 2035, there would have to be a whole lot more intimacy among strangers for car-sharing to detain even 10 per cent of the world’s fleet by then.

Forget MaaS apps – dull. Forget Airbus Helicopter’s hope that the world market for VTOLs will amount to 100 times its current output of 350 choppers a year – regulatory obstacles alone make that unlikely for 2025. Remember, instead, that Brits drove 2.2 per cent more miles in 2017 than they did in 2016, when Britain’s roads were just 2.5 per cent longer than they were in 1996.

There’s an infrastructure crisis out there, folks. It’s a pity, but designers may need to think more about shock absorbers, suspension systems and car seating than about mobile cinemas, or Odeon taxis in the sky.