Through the Woods: A Thanksgiving Round Up of Mobility Innovations
In the U.S., Thanksgiving represents the busiest travel period of the year, with AAA predicting that this year 54 million people will travel 50 miles or more before sitting down for turkey and stuffing. So how will CAVs and other mobility innovations change how we travel, not just at Thanksgiving, but yearlong? Lets take a look at a few recent stories that could point the way:
Waymo’s Self-Driving Service Hits the Bigtime
Back in August, Dan mentioned some issues Waymo’s automated vans had run into in Phoenix. Those issues don’t seem to have slowed the Alphabet (Google) owned company, as they have announced (as noted by Kevin) the launch of commercial service in December. The company is planning a slow roll out, and some cars will still have backup drivers, but by the Christmas travel season, some people in Arizona will be able to hail a driverless taxi to shuttle them to the airport.
Multimodality – Instead of a Taxi to the Airport, How About an E-Scooter and a Bus?
Uber has recently started to personalize suggestions on how to complete a trip. Depending on the distance to be traveled, the app will suggest you use a JUMP bike instead. Travelers in select cities can use Citymapper to plan trips across rideshares and public transit. In Chicago, for example, the app coordinates city buses, Divy bike shares, the ‘L’ system, and commuter rail. In London, Citymapper users can even hail a rideshare via the app’s own fleet. Meanwhile, bike and scooter startup Lime is expanding their services to include cars on their platform, and plans to deploy up to 500 cars in Seattle by the end of the year.
These companies are far from the only parties trying to synchronize how we use various mobility services. While the promise of a single app for all our mobility needs is yet to be fulfilled, the momentum is clearly there. Such an app would further enhance the congestion (and environmental) benefits that are projected to come with wider adoption of CAVs. While CAVs can better coordinate the cars that are on the road, multimodal programs can take even more cars off the road by pointing users to more efficient public transit or bikes/scooters.
Leaving Car Ownership Behind (Eventually…)
While some drivers may use self-driving cars and multimodality services to supplement their personal vehicles, there is an increasing push to replace vehicle ownership altogether. Lyft has launched a “ditch your car” challenge in a number of cities, encouraging users to try to live without their vehicles for a month. They’ve also launched a subscription service, offering 30 rides (up to $15 each) a month for $299.
Not interested in completely ditching your car? GM’s Maven platform lets you rent out your own vehicle, and is expanding in 2019 to include non-GM vehicles. Or you can opt for a more old-fashioned carpool, facilitated by Waze, which is slowly expanding a service to connect potential carpool members. So by next Thanksgiving, you may be able to snag a Waze carpool while leaving your personal vehicle behind to earn a little extra cash on Maven.
The point of this round up is not to provide a commercial for these platforms, but to highlight the ongoing disruption of the way people move through the world, a disruption that will only continue as CAVs reach greater deployment.