Principles and Megatrends Affecting Transportation

Abstract

The world is going through a massive urbanization process with the consequence that for the first time in history physical mobility is regressing. If nothing changes, the growing number of cars and its associated problems—traffic jams, high pollution levels, greater health problems, high number of fatalities, and injuries—will become unacceptable to society. Salvation will need to come from new transportation technologies, changes in work patterns, and in our personal choices on transportation means that the e-revolution can bring. Under the convergence of IT and wireless telecom, and associating the increase in power electronics together with the improvement in battery performance, fantastic new opportunities are being unleashed to reduce energy consumption and increase transport capacity, while improving the passengers’ journey experience. Furthermore, in the connected cities, the “Internet of things” applied to the transportation environment will create a complete set of new technologies and service offerings. Machine to Machine, Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle to Infrastructure communications are a few of these technologies that will allow for the advent of the unmanned vehicle society. Unmanned trains are already being deployed throughout the world and buses as well as cars will follow suit. This first chapter will give an overview of the main principles and trends that affect transportation. It will provide the readers unfamiliar with transportation challenges, a vision on how e-mobility technologies are being developed to help society apprehend such fundamental changes. It will show which features of society will be impacted by these new technologies. There will be quite a few, as the mobility revolution will disrupt the transport market as we know it, bringing opportunities and threats for many potential actors. Once cars are electric, unmanned, and managed by fleet owners there will be no differentiation between public and private transport. Taxi drivers will disappear but their services will thrive. By proposing journeys for one-fourth of the current taxi ride cost, fleets of autonomous cars will start competing with buses and light metro cars on price. As cars are more comfortable and offer more direct rides, public transport users might decide to change their transport behaviors. Furthermore, multi-points to multi-points transport services with mini vans or big cars will drastically reduce bus attractiveness. At one point in time, transport authorities will just conclude that rather than subsidizing big buses or tramways that run empty, it will make more sense to introduce such services, especially outside peak hour. In other worlds, not only can’t car manufacturers ignore the e-mobility revolution but bus and light train manufacturers are also forced to understand how their own business will be affected by such revolution in the car industry. After all, one of the principles we will see in this chapter is that all transportation means are competing against each other.

Companies and Brands Stated in the Chapter

• Twitter Inc.

• Facebook Inc.

• Ferrari S.p.A.

• BMW AG (Bayerische Motoren Werke AG)

• Nissan Motor Company Ltd

• Renault S.A.

• Toyota Motor Corporation

• Tesla Motors Inc.

• Otis elevators company

• Google Inc.

• Amazon.com Inc.

• Yahoo Inc

• Transmilenio SA

• Waze^TM of Google

• Moovit

• Porsche AG

• Uber Inc.