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January 22, 2019
- Mobility
Introduction
More people than ever live in cities, where the dominant mode of transportation continues to be single-occupant personal vehicles. This has created unprecedented burdens on city infrastructure and increased congestion on roads in urban centers. Increased congestion has resulted in greater greenhouse gas emissions, lower reliability of public transit systems, longer commutes, and an overall lower quality of living for citizens.
These challenges have created fertile ground for private-sector innovation within the mobility ecosystem. Thus far, the most significant private sector innovation in urban mobility has been ridesharing. Conventional wisdom attributes the birth of rideshare to the proliferation of smartphones and improvements in wireless connectivity and location data in cities. However, the ridesharing industry also relies on dependability and reliability of free public roads, which were a critical component in the development of the modern car-friendly city. Unfortunately, these same public roads lack the infrastructure to coordinate and interact with digital-first services as effectively as they coordinate the physical movement of people and goods.
Stephen Goldsmith is the Derek Bok Professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the 
