07/01/19 - Kick Off Session

Coming home from our internship abroad in one of the biggest cities in the world, NY, the first lecture back at university started with the topic: Mobility for all in rural regions.

To begin with, we brainstormed which topics can be related to mobility. Some commonly mentioned points were accessibility with regards to urban vs rural areas, price, or physical accessibility. Something I haven't thought of very deeply before, is that revolutionizing mobility also means that there will be new business models, because at some point of time you might not buy tickets to get from A to B anymore. You will rather buy access to transportation networks. Some of those revolutions can be self-driving busses, like they are already existent in Lyon or Dubai, more taxi services like Uber or Lyft or autonomous driving or drones. Another major trend is e-mobility, like busses, bikes, trucks, scooters or even motorbikes.

Furthermore, we collected the problems we face with public transportation or mobility in different parts of the world. In Asia for example, a major issue is the language barrier and some special requirements for accessing public transportation, e.g. a Chinese bank account in China. Also, there are a lot of traffic jams and sometimes the whole day feels like a rush hour. This can be the case in Indonesia or Taiwan, where public transportation and roads are always too busy due to overpopulation. Walking or riding a bike can be very dangerous too, because there are very different traffic rules and behaviors. While in some cities in Europe there is no public transportation between 1am and 5am, there is no public transportation at all from 6pm to midnight in Singapore! That was quite surprising for me. With high taxes on cars in Europe, people are encouraged to take bikes or public transportation. However, this can be very slow and very often there are delays or cancellations because of strikes or protests. As a contrast, in Ghana and Mexico the train system doesn't work at all and thus transportation mainly remains on the car or on the bus. Although one might expect that there is a poor infrastructure with regards to the roads etc., all the main roads appear to be okay. Last but not least, some of my personal experiences with public transportation during the past 6 months in the USA are that although you can pay nearly anything with your credit card, you need to have the exact amount of money in cash in order to access a bus. If you want to drive on your own, but don't have a car, you need to be over 21 in order to rent a car. And then there is still a surcharge for young drivers under 25. So driving in the USA can be very expensive, especially if you fail to follow the traffic rules differing from state to state.

Finally we listed the stakeholders like citizens, commuters, tourists, employees, the government, electricity and gas providers, private investors, engineering companies or innovative mobility- or delivery service providers that need to be considered when talking about public transportation. In total it were a lot more stakeholder groups than I would have come up with. As a preparation for the next session, we should think of the questions to be asked to the stakeholders. So let's see how this goes.