love the vibrant historic centre of Prague but hate seeing so many cars driving or parking around. Why? For the same reason as millions of residents of large cities around the world: congestion. And while at the advent of ride-hailing, we all believed (and some still do) that ride-hailing would help decrease car overload and congestion, we’ve seen the exact opposite happened.
Finding a solution to car overload in our cities resembles cold fusion – high hopes, great effort, many attempts but the goal remains elusive. City administrations spend millions if not billions from taxpayer money on public transport and even more on ring roads construction. Yet, due to the nightmarish urban transportation experience, our cities aren’t getting much more liveable.
New individual transport modes, new worries.
Hopes that new approaches supported by pervasive digital technologies, namely ride-hailing and ride sharing, would solve the problem, seem to have vanished into thin air. In fact, if you switch from driving your private vehicle to being driven in a shared one, you are just moving from one low-capacity vehicle to another low-capacity one, albeit with a much better vehicle utilisation.
Yes, there won’t be so many cars parking in the streets. But the number of cars driving around or the distance measured in vehicle-miles travelled (VMT) will hardly decrease. What’s worse, vehicle miles travelled might even increase, further contributing to congestion and pollution levels.
What might be earned by matching multiple passengers into a pooled ride will be lost by out-of-service travel. Ride-hail vehicles driving around without a passenger onboard searching for the best spot to hit the new order will, in many cities, consume out-of-service travel at or even above 50% of all VMT according to Schaller consulting study.
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And then, here comes the question: which mode of transportation would have been used if no ride-hailing disruption happened? According to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, each passenger who stops using transit and switches to ride-hailing services, especially in urban centres, contributes to increased VMT and, thus, congestion and pollution. Pickups and drop-offs also contribute to congestion due to disrupting the traffic flow in the curb lanes.
Multimodality, comfort, and guarantee.
We can hardly do anything about the number of people who need or wish to travel to or across the urban centre. The trend of home office and remote work definitely helps here. But is it fast enough to counter the speed of the urbanization trend?
What we can do, though, is offer a comfortable alternative to both driving our own cars and riding transit. By introducing automated interoperability between the public transport systems covering a reasonably wide metropolitan area and guaranteed taxi/ride-hailing services for the part where public transport reaches a level of discomfort beyond acceptable or is not available at all.
This would help our cities address the challenge of enhancing mobility, ensuring accessibility, increasing quality and efficiency of transport systems while reducing congestion, pollution and vehicle-related accident volumes. A very desirable state.
I’ll be happy to discuss the concept with you – hit me up at juraj@mileus.com or on my LinkedIn.
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