Great insight from McKinsey about how urban mobility is at a tipping point.
"Four major technological trends are converging: in-vehicle connectivity, electrification, car sharing, and autonomous driving. If cities can figure out how to make these elements work together, mobile-productivity solutions could be substantially improved.
In-vehicle connectivity: The broad adoption of in-vehicle connectivity, either through the mobile phone or through an embedded system and screen, is opening up possibilities. For example, real-time analytics and data on traffic conditions can reroute drivers to avoid congestion; there are apps that offer information allowing people to shift the timing and route of travel. Eventually, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication could be used to reduce accidents and to anticipate traffic congestion.
Software will play a critical role in optimizing traffic flows. Information would travel in many directions, so that traffic-control centers could get detailed intelligence from cars, for example, to clear bottlenecks faster by alerting drivers so that they can avoid congested areas. For example, Waze, a mapping app that crowd-sources traffic data, has partnered with a number of cities, including Barcelona, Boston, Jakarta, and Rio de Janeiro, to integrate its data into the city’s intelligent-transportation system traffic-control center. Drivers get detailed, user-generated real-time data, enabling them to avoid bottlenecks, while cities can use information on traffic conditions to respond to emerging situations.4
Electrification: IHS, a market-research firm, predicts that annual sales of battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids will increase from about 2.3 million units in 2014 to 11.5 million by 2022, or 11 percent of the global market. Electric power trains can significantly increase the energy efficiency of the car while decreasing the pollutants emitted. While shorter-term forecasts of EV sales remain significantly lower than their less expensive fossil-fuel counterparts, Tesla has demonstrated that electrification could penetrate certain market segments. This dynamic could be stronger in cities, where driving distances are shorter and people are less worried about running out of power. In addition, battery costs are falling faster than even the most optimistic predictions, so the economic trends are shifting in favor of EVs in the mid- to long term.
Car sharing: Most cars sit idle 90 percent of the time or more. Car sharing and other services could improve this figure significantly, and perhaps reduce the number of cars on the roads at the same time. While the effect of car-sharing on rates of car ownership is still being studied, there is little argument that widespread car-sharing would mean each vehicle gets used more intensively, thereby increasing its annual mileage from 11,700 to 20,400. Extrapolating further, shared, fully autonomous vehicles could lower the cost of personal mobility by 30 to 60 percent relative to private auto ownership."