Tuesday, November 22nd, 201 6 |

 

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The Future of Mobility at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Divya Soopal
TECH N EWS WRITER

Our global automotive industry
has an ever—evolving climate. The fad is now
frictionless, automated and personalized
travel. A future mobility system is pivoted
around driverless vehicles and shared mobility.
Let us thus explore an algorithm—led car
industry.

With ubiquitous computing, our
transport system is constantly improving.
1908: Ford’s Model—T debuted as an
automobile with a steering wheel, four tires
and seats. Today, Henry Ford would be
baffled by the new technology under the
hood. Automotive digitization has led to
important transformations. Adaptive cruise

control, automatic parallel parking, collision
warnings, and more are already widespread car
technology.

Indeed, full—fledged self—driving
vehicles already exist. They are transforming
cities. But what are their worth? The answer
is actually locked with the rapid societal and
urban transformations. Today, it is possible
to gather real—time information, seamlessly,
on every dimension of urban life. HubCab,
for instance, is a web—based interactive
visualization that shows how New York’s 170
million annual taxi trips connect the city.

Self—driving vehicles are also
described as ‘the next revolution of the roadway
by the US Department of Transportation
(DOT). This body wants to experiment with
“ cheaper, faster safer, greener, more efficient,
and more convenient transportation for

citizens (Scott Corwin et. al 2016)." A wide
range of intermodal innovations is thus
commercially viable. Nevada, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and Florida are among the states
whereby prototypes of the mobility ecosystem
are implemented in pilot—phases.

John Zimmer, co—founder of Lyft,
had envisaged the autonomous vehicle as a
‘transformative force’ to reshape our congested
cities. Laura Forlano, an associate professor
at Institute of Design at Illinois Tech, shares
the same view Recently, at the Chicago
Humanities Festival, she joined Travis Lee, the
managing director at the design firm IDEO,
to discuss the evolution of the transportation
system. With a driverless city in mind, her
design for the transportation system was that
of an intermodal innovation.

intermodal transportation

system scenario is like this: Bill is someone
who commutes to college. He takes a bus to
get to a train station. Getting off the train, Bill
takes either a bike ride or a car share to reach
college.

IHS Markit Limited, a firm feeding
insights and forecasts about the sales of
autonomous cars, including driver control,
speculates that by 2050 almost all vehicles will
be driverless. Ultimater the future of mobility
will be shaped by the advent of driverless cars.
The world’s mobility challenges will henceforth
increasingly be met with silicon rather than
asphalt.

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