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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-05
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQHfcLjgvLg
today I'd like to talk about the future of urban mobility what this means for cities and for the people who live in them about how we can cut down on congestion pollution in parking by using the private car a public good and how we can do this by using pocket sized technology combination with the existing infrastructure that exists today but let's start with the president car
it's easy to demonized the car after all there over a billion of them in the world today one for every man woman and child in the United States and Europe problem isn't so much the car itself how we use it individually the next time you roll up to a stoplight I encourage you take a look here right take a look at your left the chances are
you'll see a car with just one person in it the driver so yeah when we drive a little work been company but all this private car use leads to substantial public costs in Los Angeles and in Sydney the average commuter wastes the equivalent of two working weeks stuck in traffic every year in Mexico City it's actually even worse five weeks caught in congestion it's less time
with family it's less time at work it's a whole bunch of stress we just don't need and to make matters worse all of this congestion contributes to pollution nearly a quarter of the CO two emissions globally come from cars and sat everything I just talked about is only five percent of the problem because think about it cars sit idle ninety five percent of the time and
they do have to sit somewhere sort of a fifth of the land use in some cities is dedicated just to storing these giant hunks of metal not for homes or schools or parks but for parking spots parking lots in the United States there are eight parking spots for every car this is equivalent to twelve times the size of New York City folks this is the insanity
of the way that we design cities today we put people in the car use by design my urban design I used to live in New York City city with amazing public transportation but even then the public the subway actually gets all the way to your front door in fact to seven million cars inter Manhattan every single day this haphazard approach to transportation means that not driving
for many of us is not an option especially if you come from a lower income background and can't live near public transportation or live near where you work the Brookings institute recently released a study showing that thirty percent of jobs in the United States acquire a ninety minute commute on public transportation to get to work so many of us have no choice but to drive and
what your family has invested in a car with all of the costs that that entails you better believe we're going to use it well have to be honest when the pioneers of ride sharing got started we were thinking about any of this at all we're really just excited you could push a button on your phone a car would show up to pick you up it's only
once the industry got started and ride sharing became a thing that we took a look at the entire range of transportation and discover that the ecosystem itself it's insufficient inefficient and on equal the good news that there is an alternative to world that looks like a parking lot in moves like a traffic jam it's a world where we share rides and we take public transportation but
how do we get to that world the answer is by providing affordable reliable alternatives if individual ownership well let's start with the reliability piece ride sharing services can reliably reach every corner of the city even those parts the public transportation have a hard time with here you can see a map of Los Angeles city the covers five hundred square miles but even in this massive grid
as you can see push a button on its own well you know I in under ten minutes and the same thing is true here in Kansas city obviously very different kind of town a common denominator technology that allows this to happen real time dynamic pricing ensures that five cars on the road at any given time can match the demand from passengers even when it's raining late
at night when the Royals won the World Series and in fact the busiest hour the equivalent of rights hearings rush hour often happens late at night after the bars are closed public transportation options are limited taxis are hard to find you better believe it's that time of night when a lot of people should just not be behind the wheel of a car which leads to one
unintended but amazing consequences of ride sharing which is a reduction in drunk driving in California we saw that D. Y. fatalities decreased by percent after we launched their it's not hard to see why here is the data from Kansas city showing DIY incidents per hour verses the popularity ride sharing actually you MKC recently did a ride sharing partnership and we saw within the first month that
this partnership began requests between nine PM and three AM increased twenty percent among students here and doesn't matter where you are or where you're going with ride sharing there is no destination discrimination you'll beam I'd arrive because of what you look like or where you live if you live in the outer boroughs of New York you're just as likely to get a ride is if you
request in central Manhattan in fact a third of uber trips in the greater New York area begin or end in the outer boroughs he appeared to fewer than ten percent taxis and whether you're taking the subway or a bus or a train ride sharing can complement the existing alternatives extending them taking you that last mile or two at no additional cost to taxpayers here we have
a map of London actually prince the numbers here we found out that during the morning rush hour thirty percent of trips either and did were began within two hundred yards of the train station not a related note the London Underground recently launched the night to which is a late night train option for people to get home right away we noticed something really interesting requests from central
London a priest where as requests from the outer boroughs increased meeting the people were taking the night to get out of central London and then ride sharing to get that extra mile or two home now purely by accident this is an example of an organic symmetry tween ride sharing in public transportation but the American public transportation association recently released a study showing that the more likely
you are to use ridesharing the less likely you are to drive yourself and the more likely you are to use trains subway or bus which means that many transit agencies are increasingly looking to ride sharing to help solve some of their toughest challenges and some in New Jersey %HESITATION the city recently partnered with ride sharing in order to provide subsidized rides to and from the local
train station so commuters were able to avoid this Spencer and unpopular with taxpayers %HESITATION new parking garage in Boston there was a very different kind of a pilot in order to help improve the quality of the paratransit %HESITATION program there to help people %HESITATION with disabilities the elderly get around in this ended up being a cheaper option the pre existing alternatives so we know that ridesharing
can reliably reach every corner of the city but what about the affordability Pete's remember people won't give up their cars unless they have a reliable and affordable alternative well let's wind the clocks back a few years policy makers have been trying to crack the code on carpooling for decades this really started during World War two and then the conversation picked up again during the nineteen seventies
oil crisis we're never really able to figure this out mostly because coordinating all of these rides at scale it's really really hard to do a couple years ago we had a breakthrough so right sharing data scientists took a look and saw that there were one a duplicate trips on the network meaning the people were going to the exact same place the exact same time we ask
the question could we used mobile technology to match up a lot of these rides so that we would end up with one combined ride instead of two or three sometimes we joke that we really want to find a way to make one plus one plus one people want but in seriousness we could figure this out this would one be good for riders because a shared ride
is a cheaper ride too good for drivers because you'd be units be spending a lot more time with paying butts in seats and three good for cities because we would be putting more people if your cards the big question here is would be why would people be willing to carpool with an absolute stranger to save a discount on the ride raise your hand if you think
that they would well as many of you had suspected the answer was a resounding yes it turns out that sharing a ride isn't really a big deal because what people care about our one price into convenience here's a map of San Francisco where half the rides on the uber platform are uber pool rides so shared rides you can see on the right what that would have
looked like if instead of being shared all these have become soul arrives and this is true in many cities wherever pool is available over twenty percent of people are choosing to share their rides and already we're starting to see some amazing outcomes first the first seven months of twenty sixteen were able to save over three hundred million miles driven it's further than the distance between the
earth and Mars really the same over six million gallons of gas enough to fill nine Olympic swimming pools you were able to cut over fifty five thousand metric tons CO two emissions perhaps most impressively of all starting to change attitudes about individual car ownership again if you give people an affordable reliable alternative they're more than happy to take it today on the uber platform among writers
under thirty ten percent of them have already said that they've given up their car or no longer planning to buy one and guys were just getting started because today fewer than four percents of miles driven globally a ride sharing miles but JP Morgan estimates that by twenty thirty this number could be over twenty five percent and imagine the possibilities a new and better future is within
our grasp a future where people share rides and take public transportation the future of people have equal access to affordable transportation spending less of their incomes cars and commutes and less of their time behind the wheel and it's a future where cities are investing not in parking lots but in parks thank you
