Modern Mobility: How Cities are Reimagining Public Transport

STEVE HENDERSHOT

There is a lot riding on the next generation of public transportation projects. As more people move to cities, teams across the globe must innovate to tackle issues related to congestion while also ensuring that transit options are accessible, safe, efficient and sustainable.

GRAHAM CURRIE

The legacy of projects is, effectively, improving the way that we work the economy, the way that we travel, the way that we live our lives in cities. Cities that don’t invest to solve their problems will have bigger problems into the future and be less successful.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified^®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified^®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Public transportation and urban mobility are in the midst of a remarkable transformation, fostered by new technology and shifts in priorities toward accessibility, safety and sustainability.

A 2021 World Economic Forum white paper says broad access to good public transit options is a crucial factor in promoting social inclusion, as well as slowing climate change. Cities around the world are greenlighting projects that aim to expand access and cut down on commute times. Some use creative engineering, such as a project to build a 4.5-kilometer, or 2.8-mile, public transit gondola in suburban Paris. Others address the needs of historically underserved neighborhoods: When Chicago added first- and last-mile shuttle buses to its existing public transportation infrastructure, the number of jobs accessible to underserved communities jumped by up to 90 percent.

From Santiago to Milan, teams in cities around the globe are also working to transform city systems with more environmentally friendly public transit options, like electric buses. India’s state-controlled Convergence Energy Services Ltd. is planning a $10 billion electric bus contract to help decarbonize public transport and help meet the country’s goals for net zero emissions.

Today, we’re going to take a look at the state of public transportation and the types of projects that are helping push it into the future. We begin with Graham Currie, director of the Public Transport Research Group and professor of public transport at Monash University in Melbourne.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT

As cities tackle challenges related to density and access to public transit, we’re seeing a lot of new technologies incorporated. What are some of those trends, and how are you seeing them translated into project activity?

GRAHAM CURRIE

Three groups: Information, communication, technology (ICT); fixed infrastructure; and then variable moveable infrastructure. So quite a lot happening in ICT; smartphones and trip planning apps really have created a huge accessibility to public transport information for everybody as they’re mobile. Also, we’ve got some great technologies now for ticketing, using smartphones actually as your ticket and even credit cards now. And long term, there’s much interest in what’s called mobility as a service, the idea of trip planning agencies for all modes, acting as trip planning and also ticket purchasing.

Fixed infrastructure—lots of new lines, investment in metros globally. The new side of it, the innovative side, is certainly bus rapid transit infrastructure, the idea that our bus networks could be as good as railways and how to design for those. The vehicle side—automation of railways, particularly driverless trains. More than 40 percent of all trains in cities in Asia are now driverless. Lot of benefits of those things, and we’ll see more of that: cost benefits, ridership benefits, environmental benefits. We’ve had some great innovations in new vehicles. Frankly, what used to be a bus and what used to be a light rail vehicle are merging, and we’ve got some great new vehicles in Europe and China, which frankly you’d probably think it was a tram but it’s actually a bus, and that really helps reduce costs. The other big, huge driver in vehicles for environmental reasons is bus electrification, which is really dominating certainly the bus-end of the global public transport industry.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Especially with those latter couple [of] cases, how do agencies approach this from a risk management perspective? Because as you mentioned, you’re often looking for a multiple-decade usage horizon, and if you’re doing that with technology that’s only recently developed or vetted, how do you sort of balance capturing the most innovation possible with ensuring that it’s going to hold up over that intended lifespan and deliver the value that it’s supposed to?

GRAHAM CURRIE

Your question speaks to the problem, so you’re obviously aware of these issues. Frankly, bus electrification is a proven technology. Indeed, what bus operators now know is it’s a better technology. It is actually cheaper than diesel buses to operate in the long term. There are significant issues in the upfront investment with electric vehicles, but the problem is not really the technology or the operators. They’re all quite experienced in this now. The problem is governance because bus electrification requires significant investment in electric supply networks. This speaks to unconnected governments who are forwarding policies for environmental reasons without really thinking of the implications or helping operators to implement them. I predict lots of problems along the way with this. The answer’s going to be investment and long-term planning and governance. But that’s still the trend—we are doing good things for the environment, and it takes work.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What is the process for thinking through how best to pursue long-term sustainability when you’re executing a transit project that will, hopefully, serve a community for decades?

GRAHAM CURRIE

It’s quite straightforward—you plan ahead, explore the capabilities of the existing infrastructure, and identify gaps and do something about it. The problem is that that requires many aspects of governance in many fields of infrastructure to be coordinated. At the moment, in different economies, we have privatization. We have corporatization of different agencies. We’ve even privatized electricity supply and distribution in some countries. And this means disconnects sometimes between players. In transport systems, for example, in London, the operators who’ve got a contract to actually deliver electrification are finding that they need to negotiate with the private sector electricity supplier, who is a monopoly, who is the only person that can supply to their depot. But the electricity supplier sees the bus operators as a very small client within a gigantic market. So they’re going to miss out. And the answer in all of this is government intervention to ensure the infrastructure works for the public purpose. But unfortunately the economies are not necessarily geared that way. The answer is, well, effectively, a structural reform of planning and responsibility for achieving the public purpose, perhaps even for in the short term while we electrify the networks.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Let’s look ahead. What innovations are you most excited to see in public transportation in the next several years?

GRAHAM CURRIE

The sector is held back by funding, so costs of large infrastructure projects are a problem to implement, yet the needs across cities globally are growing. What we need is an ability to tap into this huge growth in a more cost-effective way. Light rail projects are a great example of modern technologies that can really transform cities, but frankly, they’re far too expensive. Of all the new technologies that are emerging, I’m really interested in what’s called the trackless tram. These are new technologies which enable bus systems to operate like tram systems. They have almost the same vehicle, very high ride quality. They’re a lot more than a bus, but we don’t need tracks. They’re electric, but we don’t need overhead wires. They’re the type of thing that can be put into a city in a month rather than four to five years of construction. That could transform cities because they’re so much cheaper and doable in cities.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

In many cities, public transport mainstays such as buses and trains are now part of a larger mix of transit options such as ride-sharing and electric scooters. Transit leaders in Vancouver, Canada, decided to embrace that ecosystem of public and private options by creating a streamlined way to access all those different services. Projectified^®’s Hannah LaBelle spoke with Camile Machado, project manager for new mobility at Vancouver’s TransLink, about a pilot that tested how bringing all those options together would affect customers’ transit decisions.

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HANNAH LABELLE

So TransLink has an annual open call for innovation that looks to partner with organizations to solve a transit problem. One recent pilot from an open call was the Shared Mobility Compass Card. In this project, people could use a single card to access public transit as well as ride-share services. What prompted your team to select this pilot, and what problem was it looking to solve?

CAMILE MACHADO

The main challenge we were facing is that even though we have this wide range of mobility options in metro Vancouver, and residents have access to an extensive public transit system and private mobility providers—including bike share, car share, carpooling, taxi ride hailing, e-bike share and now recently scooter share as well—it’s very challenging still for people to connect between these modes. So they all operate independently, and the customer must interface with each service provider separately, preventing integrated or multimodal travel, for example. So that was the aim when we launched the open innovation call—to understand how could we improve the seamless transportation in the region? And with that, we decided to partner with three local players, Evo, Modo and Mobi, and to combine all the services into one single program that we call the Shared Mobility Compass Card.

The objective was to better understand the customer needs and how the program influenced the mode choice. So we all have a common goal, which is to shift people away from their private cars and explore more shared modes, and we used this common goal to draft and to really design the service. We explore, for example, the initial coordination, the governance, technical integration, privacy and data management required to enable a seamless experience for a customer. We had approximately 160 employees of 13 selected Vancouver-based organizations, and they all received a specially branded Compass Card. Compass Card is our transit card, and that card for that program could also be used to access transit, car share and bike share services for work-related travel.

HANNAH LABELLE

How did you gather feedback from those participating in the pilot, whether that was the riders themselves or the organizations that were participating or having their employees participate?

CAMILE MACHADO

The first one was really collecting usage data, and for that we use the data from the company. So how many transit trips all the employees had or car share trips or bike share trips, when they happened, the impact of seasonality, for example, the impact of weather on all of these trips and the choice they made between the modes.

We also deployed several surveys, and the surveys were really to collect the perception of the customers in terms of what features they like. That was very valuable for us. We’re really trying to test the technical feasibility of implementing something that’s more and more seamless. So first was really to understand what they like, what they didn’t like, what they used, what new features we have to implement for this customer experience to be even better and also what was their perception in terms of mode shift.

There are so many different features and so many different shiny new things that [are] coming to this field, and it’s really hard to us to understand if they really add value unless we test it out and we ask the people who are using the service how useful they really are and, based on that information, we could make better decisions—and that was the approach we were taking.

HANNAH LABELLE

What would you say was the biggest challenge the team faced while executing this pilot?

CAMILE MACHADO

I think the biggest challenge was really to deal with something that was quite new. So we know mobility as a service has been deployed, and deployments are really growing in number over the world, but this is very new, and there [are] different ways you can design that. So defining what would work for us, I think, was the biggest challenge, and also creating this environment of trust where we could actually work together to this common goal because many people would see this as competitors sitting together and designing a program. For us, we are not competitors when we are sitting and talking about the Shared Mobility Compass Card. We’re really partners trying to reach a common goal, and I think creating this understanding that we are all working together, it’s really important for any kind of deployments that require partnership between public and private companies.

HANNAH LABELLE

The Shared Mobility Compass Card pilot closed in 2020. What value did the project deliver, and what are the next steps?

CAMILE MACHADO

For us, the biggest value was actually understanding what was important in terms of service design. So one thing that we didn’t implement for this pilot was [a] trip planning tool, for example. We collected feedback to understand if investing in a multimodal trip planning tool would make sense, and based on the user feedback, we decided to, as we move forward to phase two, to develop that feature because one of the things they said: “This is missing from the service delivery, and we would love to have something like that for any kind of future deployment.” We were able to make sure we have a very minimal viable product. We developed something that was not perfect but was good enough so it can be tested, and then based on the testing and the real user feedback, we’re able to go back to the executives, for example, and pitch something even more bold and better for our next phase.

We are working on a phase two that will be something even bigger with deeper integration, with more features, and we’ll be targeting it to consumers and not to businesses this time around. We are trying to reduce the number of people that will join the pilot just because then we can manage the risk, we can understand and collect feedback before we take a step further. We are very excited. I think this one will be [an] even bigger and better deployment, and we will be able to learn even more and, hopefully, convert that into a permanent service in the future.

HANNAH LABELLE

When it comes to collaborating with these different partners, what were some of the good practices that you established?

CAMILE MACHADO

The collaborative approach, in terms of designing the strategy, designing the common goals and designing the KPIs, is one important piece so we all align, and not only align, but they are really part of the decision-making process. So I’ve seen many deployments where you have one organization that’s leading the entire process, and they just invite the other organizations as long as they comply with everything that this main organization wants. We decided to take a different approach where we sit every two weeks and we discuss the progress of the pilot, what we want to accomplish, what we need to get fixed; and we decide in terms of strategy, the KPIs, we monitor the KPIs and the objectives, and we discuss how to move forward. Because we are talking about [a] public body, it takes longer than the private sector would expect. So if we keep this very transparent, and they understand why we need to go through all these extra steps because we are a public body and so, one, it’s much easier to keep the engagement and to keep the objectives really aligned between all organizations and the resources allocated in a more longer term.

HANNAH LABELLE

What are some of the benefits of this trend for public-private partnerships in public transportation projects?

CAMILE MACHADO

We have so many opportunities right now to leverage from all this innovation that is coming from the private sector and that probably the public sector, if [it] tried to isolate and tried to replicate that, it wouldn’t get as fast to the same result. The public can really offer the ground for testing and really try to understand what makes sense for the region, and the private has a much more fast pace in terms of development and implementation so it can really speed up things and make all this innovation available to the public much faster than we could if we work it isolated. So I think that’s really beneficial from both sides and that will only grow in number. Or I hope it will only grow in number in the future.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

There are more ways than ever to get around the world’s cities. Project leaders must push collaboration and innovation so that the coming wave of public transport projects will expand mobility in ways that are safe, sustainable and available to all.

NARRATOR

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