The Heterogeneous Future of Urban Mobility

The telecommunications ecosystem has come a long way from land lines and fax machines. The field is now crowded with a schmorgasbord of options, from WhatsApp to Facetime to Skype to email. In Faster, Smarter, Greener Venkat Sumantran, Charles Fine, and David Gonsalvez envision a similar transformation of the urban mobility ecosystem in the coming years. Once limited almost exclusively to cars in most American cities, urban mobility in the future will be defined by a diverse range of modes, from bike share to autonomous transit, as well as more traditional options like rail and walking. As scholars of business who have worked with the auto industry, it is notable that these authors are making such bold claims about urban mobility. In the lightly edited interview that follows, we discuss the technologies powering this revolutionary shift, and how even the most auto-dependent cities can adapt to it.

You are the nation’s leading experts on cars some of you are part of the same research group that literally wrote the book on the automobile industry, The Machine That Changed the World. Now, a couple of decades later, Faster, Smarter, Greener details a veritable “perfect storm” of factors that is ushering in a new era of urban mobility. Indeed, you have shifted your own focus from how industries work better and become more competitive to the mobility ecosystems of cities and metropolitan areas. What are the factors contributing to this “perfect storm?”