Mobility Lab | SXSW’s Top 5 Transportation Trends

SXSW’s Top 5 Transportation Trends

March 24, 2014

Building on the car and ride sharing startups of 2013, smart transportation was a strong category at SXSW Interactive 2014 this month in Austin, Texas.

The five trends worth watching for 2014 and beyond are big data, the sharing economy, smarter apps, smarter systems, and driverless cars.

1. Big Data

Big data continues to be the most rapidly evolving sector in marketing. Companies are coming up with new and unique ways to analyze massive data sets, to simplify them for end users, to visualize them, to customize them, and to accelerate insights. Big data has provided marketers with deeper customer insights and profiling, so that one-to-one marketing has become a reality.

IBM is taking the lead in this area with the IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities. This center provides an executive dashboard or “mission control” to help cities collect, manage, and share data in a single view to coordinate city work that spans across agencies such as transportation, emergency management, water, public safety, social services, and more.

The data center enables cities to:

respond to and collaborate on events and incidents based on input received across agencies
involve citizens and businesses in reporting and resolution
gather and analyze feedback and citizen sentiment using social media
provide trends analysis, and
provide near real-time “key performance indicators” analysis.

The IBM Intelligent Transportation Solution can help visualize road patterns up to one hour into the future, provide detours for traffic or accident delay avoidance, and even change light patterns along the route to increase traffic flow.

Other companies are using data visualization to understand more about how cities move. With its 600,000 members worldwide, Car2Go uses visualization-mapping software based on daily trips and member data to track travel patterns.

Here is an example of Car2Go movements in Portland, Oregon over a three-day period by time slot. This data visualization is important for cities to understand how people are using collaborative consumption and their travel patterns without owning a car. This software can help change people’s minds that car ownership is no longer mandatory.

2. Sharing Economy

The sharing economy continues to expand beyond car, ride, and bike sharing, into new avenues such as parking-place sharing, electric-scooter sharing and more. Getaround claims that its members earn more than $800 a month and up to $10,000 per year by sharing their cars.

But, the future of mobility is combining shared vehicles, drivers, buses, and bikes all under a single membership. Project 100 is using Las Vegas as a test market for a complete transportation system. For a monthly subscription fee, users can borrow a bike, get a driver via an app, and even borrow a Tesla. For $50 a month, you can use bike sharing, shuttles, and small electric cars, for $150 a month, you can also have occasional use of the car-sharing system and on-call drivers, and for $500 a month you can have unlimited access. Their official rollout will include 100+ on-demand drivers, 100+ shared cars, 100+ shared bikes, and 100+ shared shuttle bus stops all under a single membership.

3. Smarter Apps

It has been said that, on average, 30 percent of cars in congested downtown traffic are searching for parking. While the actual statistic may be in contention, parking search is a big source of congestion and traffic in business centers.

More efficient, smarter mobile apps for parking – such as Parking Panda and ParkMe – are helping to alleviate this by enabling people to find and reserve parking, and even include heat maps that show drivers available parking on a block-by-block basis.

To make it even easier to find parking while driving, you can use WonderVoice, the hands-free voice assistant, to respond to Facebook and listen to music.

4. Smarter Systems

All this new technology points to a trend of multi-modal systems talking to one another, and a single-payment system. Connected-vehicle research is already being conducted through USDOT to enable safe, networked wireless communications among vehicles, infrastructure, and personal communication devices. Eventually, cell phones will be able to communicate with traffic signals, enabling pedestrians to cross safely at intersections.

CityMobil2 is setting up a pilot program for automated road-transport systems (also known as CTS – Cybernetic Transport Systems) to be implemented in cities in Europe. Cities are bidding to be sites to host demonstrations of vehicle automation as part of their public transport networks – a fleet of communication-enabled cybercars – road vehicles with automated driving capabilities.

Part of these smarter systems will include things like dynamic pricing (see Pulsar’s Telly Award-winning video for the Virginia DOT below), surge pricing, street, road, and path sensors, solar parks, and idle-free zones.

5. Driverless cars

Several sessions focused on the implications of driverless cars. How will they impact travel behavior, and our choices of where we live and work? Dr. Chandra Bhat of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas said that cities may have larger footprints, creating more sprawl, less walking, and maybe even the purchase of larger vehicles that will impact road capacity.

He believes that car ownership may be redefined, moving towards a car-sharing model in which vehicles (or transportation in general) comes to the traveler.

Other transportation related sessions included:

[This article was originally published by Pulsar Advertising.]

Photos by Nan Palmero and Robert Francis