Move 2020 was the second of a series of mobility forums which started last year. In 2019 I was impressed by what was a fresh, new approach to the world of mobility/technology exhibitions and seminars. There were no stages full of increasingly ageing mobility revolutionaries (who have never btw ever ran a transport operation) telling us (again!) how easy, how simple and how everything MaaS, EVs, Connected Vehicles and Autonomous Vehicles were/could be. Technology would solve everything. Operations, edge cases, outliers, discontinuities, supply and demand, and contingency management of course never featured. Presumably that all gets resolved by magic. Instead at both Move 2019 and Move 2020 there were some serious innovators, some great networking opportunities and lots of small start-ups with innovative and creative really new fresh ideas with a practical application.
Following London’s success the Move movement is going international. At the second London event I along with many others was asked to talk and below is a synopsis of what I said. Hey if the emperor has no clothes I think he should be told!
I started with an apology it was not my intention to upset anyone but just because you don’t set out to do something doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen! My stance was pretty much this. I have attended more MaaS, Future Transport and CAV conferences, symposiums and exhibitions than I care to recall over the last six or seven years. Six or seven years ago the siren voices excitedly claimed a revolution in new thinking, new ideas, new business models (sic), and new forms of future transport…………..and they have claimed that same revolution ever since. They have stood there with meaningless graphs claiming massive ‘percentage’ take up – every one of these launches has been a success but none have made any money…….system doing well send more money!
Recently my experience is that these now ageing revolutionaries sound somewhat hollow. There has of course been no revolution certainly in the terms that these people predicted. Future transport and new technology has been the sum total of a few damp squib pilots, soft launches and proofs of concept, glossy reports claiming untold levels of success and all of it leading precisely nowhere. The only revolution there has been is the lemming like race to pour as much serious money down the drain as quickly as possible…..and when I say serious some research suggests $70bn has been invested (sic) in future transport globally. I am not convinced it has been quite so cheap. The net result huff, puff, lots of PowerPoint slides, conferences galore and massive and unsustainable losses. People who never used a cab in their lives have deserted the tube and the bus and have been riding around in private hire vehicles paying less than ever before and in most cases nothing (the book Super Pumped (well worth the read) claims that every ride was subsidised by 60%). Some revolution! More a case of collective madness! Who starts a business with no idea how it will ever make any money and manages to persuade other people, presumably well educated, experienced financial people to pour billions into a black hole? Clever and persuasive ones I guess.
I went on to explain that I was approached a couple of years ago by the then Transport Catapult (a Government backed quango now known as Connected Places Catapult) who were carrying out some sensible research into why there had been no take up of MaaS. My response to their question was a simple one – MaaS is a solution in desperate need of a problem. I attend many evening/late night events and have yet to see a single person who can’t get home because there is no one method of booking and paying for all of their transport – fact!
I have had more than a little to do with bus companies in my career and I can tell you running and maintaining buses, hiring staff, dealing with headways (gaps between buses) and keeping costs down is what bus companies do and do well – what they don’t do is technology. Neither do they nor the railways operate unified or simple ticketing essential to making MaaS understood, simple and workable. Who deals with exceptions, complaints and fare queries…..er. Door to door ticketing across multiple transport modes apportioned fairly is at the moment a pipe dream (btw don’t write and tell me about some wonderful scheme in a capital city the size of a British village and how it works so well with its undeclared but huge and growing user base….that is for the birds). Add to this the need for accurate fixed pricing for taxis and PH and you have a very difficult if not almost impossible deployment.
I’d go further why would I move from paying my car parking on one app, my rail travel on another and the underground via my debit card wave technology? How much time will it save me? What difference will it make to my life? To shift I need either a carrot or a stick orif you want me to do it quickly…both – why would bus companies, train operators, taxi and PH companies and car parks discount their fares to enable the MaaS operator to lure me with financial benefits (the carrot) – why indeed? Just as importantly how many votes are there to be had in removing peoples’ cars from them (stick) – we don’t need Dominick Cummings to tell us it is very few!
One of Europe’s failings, as well as our own national government’s was that there was no meaningful attempt to implement or even agree a system of inter-operability amongst disparate MaaS and other transport booking/payment travel operators. We therefore have pretty much every city developing its own card based travel methodologies. Can I use a Leeds M card in Manchester? Will the TfGM card/app be usable in London? Why not? Surely restricting MaaS type functionality to individual cities is pointless in these days of improving and dare I say it almost joined up public transport? One could almost claim that TfL has MaaS in operation – a mixture of modes and universally available payment methods (card based wave technology/apple pay) and it largely works. Is London leading the way – TfL operate an open system (no card/app needed to access it) with an open payment methodology – is this the way forward? Not sexy but hey it works and in transport that counts for an awful lot!
I then took the audience for a canter through ‘future transport’. There were a few queasy looks in the audience. Let’s get real! CAV needs 5G – there is a growing realisation that there is no business case for 5G. The costs of 5G are exponential to 4G. There is no business case. To rely simply on mobile phones to provide the case is a lost cause. There are many earnest and harrowing meetings taking place searching for a problem needing a 5G solution and silver bullets are in short supply. The logic (sic) that Uber started life too early and if it had waited for autonomous vehicles it would have been shovelling cash into the bank – utter nonsense. Commodities by their very nature operate at a market rate – no driver = a lower price. There will be no ‘no driver’ bonus for anyone just another opportunity to ratchet down fares and if 5G does goes ahead any profit will be wiped out by the 5G costs which will be prohibitive at worst and painful at best.
Autonomous vehicles in large metropolitan cities are a poorly thought through shot in the dark. They are CV collateral – everyone in transport needs to claim some experience of them and have a line on their CV. The madness and mayhem of the current road network won’t disappear because you take the driver away. Roads operating at 100% will still get blocked, congested and wrecked whenever a road needs to be dug up or a bus (autonomous or not) breaks down. City planners surely don’t believe the nonsense slides that every CAV proponent produces showing empty sunny streets, an odd gently stuttering pod travelling down between tree lined roads, with a blonde lady and her daughter waiting under a cloudless sky – do they?
I have sat on a number of expert panels evaluating this company or that’s prototype CAV operation and six questions and five minutes into those meetings and they have largely ground to a halt. Double PHDs and rocket scientists have their place but it is a long way from designing cab operations. People’s habits may change with a new generation (they won’t always be new and will be replaced by other generations with other ideas), shared workspace, working at home, flexible working, living in cities etc but in the short and medium term i.e. before I kick the bucket you are still likely to see people in the suburbs wanting to travel into town x times per week. People in smart, trendy and cool neighbourhoods wishing to travel to places of work in the morning and back home in the evening.
Demand will still be largely polarised into peaks. So the logic that the CAV pods will somehow become self-levelling (demand and supply moves effortlessly into beautiful harmony and perfect alignment) is if I am generous a myth and more bluntly plain stupid. Vehicles will need to be sent to areas of demand in the mornings and the evenings and during quieter periods the tin will need to be stored somewhere other than on the public highway except if it rains when many more will be needed…… temporal, diurnal and geographical demand never has been and never will be smooth and although autonomy could resolve the vagaries and perturbations of supply there may be additional controls on vehicle numbers in cities……you get the picture another get rich quick scheme falters.
There is a place for CAV in the short term assuming 5G is resolved (a big if) and it is clearly in areas where pedestrians and other road users are separated from the autonomous pods. Airport car parks are one example there are no doubt others where replacing the lumbering buses that always pull away just as you walk out of the terminal with a continuous flow of driver less vehicles would be a vast improvement in service and reduction in cost.
I closed my talk at Move 2020 by focusing on what could be, and how we could get there. To make the level of cultural, financial and behavioural change needed to clean up our air, get road traffic accidents (aka KSIs) to zero and migrate people to active travel and public transport and out of car ownership and usage some serious sticks and carrots are required. Simply imposing higher congestion charges, extending congestion charge areas and gradually blocking access to streets for any vehicle that is not electric won’t do it. It will simply exacerbate transport poverty. Ken Livingstone when he introduced the congestion charge in London had been pre-emptive in providing far more buses in London prior to the introduction, he incentivised them with the Quics contracts. This carrot before stick approach largely worked. If you want me to stop driving remove the car park at the station but before you do I need a reliable method of travelling to the station otherwise I drive to directly to work and bypass the railway. Removing car parks by the way hits everyone rich or poor and is a big disincentive to driving and even owning private cars. And given land prices, housing shortages etc the prospect of less car parks will be appealing to many. There are also many other sticks and carrots available to policy makers.
If we want a revolution, a real one, we need as a society to accept it, embrace it and to invest in it. We need to provide the carrots necessary to begin to move people out of car ownership, initially to persuade them to drive less miles in their car, we can then bring in the sticks to prise people away from car ownership altogether. The carrots will need to be imaginative, effective and filling the gaps that currently exist and which are largely responsible for the hitherto growth and societal dependence on cars. Demand Responsive Transport needs to begin to fill those gaps – not a bus, not a taxi but somewhere in between at scale with reliability as a cornerstone of the model. Learning the lessons of the ‘revolution’ maybe whatever comes next needs to be brought to the market with some idea how a great service can be provided profitably – that way we may actually get to see a revolution worth talking about.
No questions were permitted at Move2020 presentations but I had plenty afterwards and many keep coming along with a number of dissenting and in some cases disingenuous emails. We’ll get there folks, but this is not going to be an easy or pain free gig.
Dr Mike Galvin is an industry veteran with four decades of senior management experience in London, nationally and internationally in taxis, private hire, platforms and demand responsive transport. He now operates as a freelance consultant.