Peter Torrellas, an evangelist for efficient planning and management of infrastructure, recently took a walk around New York City with his Floridian mother who he discovered had never heard of bikeshare.
While the hundreds of transportation experts in attendance at the Innovation in Mobility Public Policy Summit in Washington D.C. this week are mostly deep in the weeds of planning and implementation of programs, Torrellas made it painfully clear that the transportation sharing economy remains a niche (albeit growing) practice.
Torrellas was the Wednesday lunch keynote speaker on “The Evolving World of Transportation.” He is vice president of Strategy and Business Development at Optym – “a global leader in providing transportation and logistics solutions.”
He said, “There are deeper issues that aren’t be worked on right now in our industry. I have trepidation and caution that we tend to say how things are working well and I think that is extremely dangerous.”
Torrellas said shared mobility is one of the most important things happening in all of infrastructure, and he fears that public agencies move slowly simply because they’re not designed to truly move at all. He added that he doesn’t think this implies that government is the problem, just that a parade of new entrepreneurs will always be able to be the nimble first movers.
The way we all look at infrastructure needs to change, he added. “While people are dealing with on-the-ground tactical issues, we need to centralize a body that is focusing on those long-term issues to create a space where innovation is allowed to take place. That body would accelerate and create repeatable markets.
“There has to be an alignment between federal, state, and local officials to accomplish a specific goal that is written down on paper. If you never have alignment in policy, you’ll never have alignment in real dollars.”
Torrellas said the problem of not keeping up with change is getting worse. Expanded high-speed rail is an obvious answer for how to connect markets, but that is mostly off the table, and, from a connecting-markets perspective, every other mobility option beyond rail is being avoided and not discussed at all.
Aligning the transportation sharing economy industry should go beyond an alignment of policy, he said. “It can’t be done by reading literature about what some other city did.”
While Torrellas said having a database of best practices is fine, the industry should go beyond that and also build a database of what people are doing in real time. He said organizations like the newly formed Shared-Use Mobility Center and the co-sponsors of the summit should have a go-to “swat team” that would be able to provide expertise to cities and organizations instead of large consulting firms that are typically lacking in focused expertise.
Such a centralized decision-making structure would need to:
- Improve the dynamics between the business-as-usual dynamics between the public and private sectors
- Build a major public-education campaign along the lines of “Got Milk?” and
- Strengthen equity and access. As Torrellas said, “Shared-use mobility needs to address equity issues. Right now it’s like the Whole Foods of transportation options.”
What then are the next steps? We’ll see as this summit wraps up and we all go back to our mobility corners. Stay tuned …
Photo by Jeffrey Holmes