Urban mobility and public transport: future perspectives and review

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this work is to review urban transportation likely to be offered in the future. Trip-making behaviour has already changed considerably as lifestyles change and they will continue to change in the future. This work reflects and places emphasis on profound thinking about the possibilities, rather than predicting them. Thoughts about possibilities for the future draw upon imagination, perceived and justified feasibility, and lessons gained from the past. This work attempts to capture the possibilities, logistics and travel modes of future urban transportation. A visionary, feasibility-related approach grounded in a realist perspective is proposed, only conceptually, to explore plausible visions for the future. In addition, this work shows the inefficiency of using private cars (PCs) and argues that in the development of autonomous and electric vehicles, PCs cannot provide a solution competitive with the potential that urban transportation systems have for the future. Hence, the solutions for the future must be based on public transport (PT) modes of travel, regardless of whether they are metro, bus, light rail, tram, ridesharing services, an ordinary taxi, personal rapid transit, or any other PT-based future mode. The key principal of operation for the mobility of a smart city will be the ability to optimize the connectivity of movement in order to approach a seamless move, while endowing the phrase door-to-door travel with new meaning. Finally, it would be remiss not to mention the unforeseeable implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for future mobility, more controllable by automation of non-privately owned vehicle, and with the prospect of people demonstrating a greater inclination towards changing their habits, behaviour, and thinking paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• Future urban mobility
• public transport
• private car
• innovative travel modes
• mode shift

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his sincere thanks to KOTI – Korea Transport Institute for partly supporting this study, and to Dr. Tao Liu, for having good and interesting conversations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to express his sincere thanks to KOTI – Korea Transport Institute for partly supporting this study.