How Do We Transition To Clean Transportation? ‘MOVE – Mobility Re-Imagined’ Answers

What’s the tipping point to clean transportation? Electric cars and trucks? Mobility as a Service software (MaaS)? Abundant access to charging? Partnerships? All of the above and more, according to sessions at the MOVE - Mobility Reimagined conference this week in Austin, Texas.

“Mobility Reimagined” is an apt name for what the U.S. especially needs to do to transition to a clean, net zero transportation system. The conference sessions reflected the need for an integrated network of transportation infrastructure and options to best serve the wide range of types of communities across the U.S. (and cities around the world) to get to net zero. It means transitioning decades-old transit systems, using new technologies like MaaS that can help riders seamlessly connect to their region’s transportation options with minimal waiting and inconvenience to get where they need to go.

The constellation of new federal legislation – the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Act that provide collectively hundreds of billions of dollars – is designed in part to provide much-needed funding to facilitate this transition. The opportunities to leverage these massive funds wasn’t talked about as much at MOVE as I would have thought it would be, but leaders at transportation agencies from Los Angeles, North Carolina, and San Antonio, Texas who spoke on my panels said they are preparing to do so.

Data, data and more data – but what kind and to find out what?

Data is one of the keys to tailor transit systems to residents’ travel patterns, these leaders indicated, including Emily Royall, Smart City Administrator of San Antonio and Sarah Searcy, Deputy Director of Innovation and Data at the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Integrated Mobility Division. With areas too vast to cover door-to-door, these agencies are using other means to find out what their residents, both urban and rural, need and want, including surveys, and partnerships with houses of worship, schools and community centers.

San Antonio is leveraging data and partnerships to constantly improve their systems that serve their population of over 1.5 million, with what they call SmartSA. This includes their “SmartSA Sandbox” where they bring in residents to try out their innovations and give feedback, to help the city respond to their needs. Emily Royall describes her work as “at the intersection of urban planning, data and technology to build inclusive futures for cities,” with a focus on keeping people “at the center of smart cities,” including “creating greater public oversight over smart city technologies and the data that powers them.”

Importantly, Royall told the MOVE audience that she and other innovative city leaders around the country are sharing best practices among themselves, which she said is, “one of the best kept secrets.”

North Carolina DOT’s Searcy, who interestingly brings a Masters in Sociology and a Bachelors in Art and Archeology to this research and development of innovative transportation systems, said you have to meet people where they are and understand their priorities.

North Carolina has the second largest rural population in the U.S., she said, which means it has the second-largest number of people who live in rural areas and, therefore, need access to transportation. North Carolina’s integrated transportation system includes “72 public and 300-plus private airports, heliports and landing areas,” six intercity passenger rail routes serving about a million riders a year, “more than 20 ferries on seven regular routes” carrying hundreds of thousands of vehicles and passengers a year, 98 public transit systems serving 70 million-plus passengers per year, two ports, and highways and roadways, according to their website. That’s a lot to seamlessly tie together to help people efficiently and effectively get where they want to go.

Conan Chung, Chief Operating Officer of LA Metro, which is the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, specified on a panel about MaaS that I moderated at MOVE that they are anonymizing the data to protect riders’ privacy. Since these agencies do not have the advanced technologies in-house to collect this data, they partner with technology companies. LA Metro is partnering with RideCo, he said, whose CEO Prem Gururajan also joined our panel.

And EVs…and their infrastructure.

Then there’s the need to get millions of people into electric vehicles. Linda Zhang, Chief Engineer of the ground-breaking Ford F-150 Lightning, the 100% electric version of the iconic F-150, the best-selling truck in the U.S., told the MOVE audience in the keynote conversation she and I had on stage that the majority of the Lightning’s buyers are new to the F-150 and thousands are new to Ford and to electric vehicles. Suzy Deering, Ford’s Chief Marketing Officer, told me on Electric Ladies Podcast that 76% of F-150 Lightning buyers are new to the F-150.

It sounds like, if we can get truck drivers into electric vehicles, the charging infrastructure built leveraging the new hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding allocated in that direction, and have millions of residents in rural as well as urban areas using more mass transit options, then maybe, just maybe, we can actually have a successful, clean transportation system in the U.S.