Is the era of public urban transport over?

The article tackles new technologies impact on urban transportation and gives some projections on how the future of urban passenger transit would look like. The impact of new technologies will contribute to the obsolescence of the public urban transport.

Рубрика Транспорт
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Язык английский
Дата добавления 06.04.2019
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Automation and teleworking complete each other in the process of diminishing the necessity to commute, making the impact on city transport more noticeable. Indeed, whereas automation primarily concerns the blue-collar workers (cashiers are replaced by automated checkout systems, etc.), who usually use public means of transport because they are cheaper, at least at this moment, teleworking is mainly the labor mode of more well-off population, who usually use more expensive private means of transportation. This means that the necessity to commute to and from work will diminish in all strata of the city dwellers and will certainly concern all types of transport (private/public). Although it is difficult to measure exactly which of the new labor market changes (automation or teleworking) will have greater impact on which transport mode use (public or private), it is likely that teleworking will primarily impact the use of private transportation, whereas automation will have greater impact on ridership decrease in public transport.

To the category of teleworkers (or homeworkers), the number of which will increase as much statistical data suggests (UK' Department for Transport, 2014), we can add a certain number of e-learners. The younger generation is eager to use new technologies, and quickly adapts to this kind of learning; we can expect that the fast growing e-learning can have an impact on intercity passenger transit. There is no reliable statistics and forecasts concerning the share of e-learning vs. classic classroom learning and we cannot exactly predict how the abandonment of classic classroom will affect the necessity to transit to the university or school and thus affect the city transportation. Moreover, some forms of learning requiring direct social interaction (kindergarten, grade school), are less likely to be completely replaced by e-learning, whereas others could be (learning management system and - at least partly - university studies). Consequently, if the impact of the telestudying on intercity transit is to be expected, this impact is not the same for different forms of education and is very difficult to ascertain at this moment.

Even if we do not take into account the impact of e-learning on the city transit, and consider only the impact of automation, teleworking and ecommerce, the expected decrease in city transit seems to be substantial. Public and private means of transportation will lose more than half of its riders, since commuting to work and shopping constitutes the main purposes of the intercity transit. Even if we take into consideration the growing number of city population, as well as the fact that people's travelling habits will change (they would certainly travel more for personal leisure purposes if liberated from their jobs), the city transit decrease numbers for different factors seems to be so important, that such factors would only have moderate effect on the overall urban transit decrease.

If those assumptions would turn out to be true, the need for transit will not only substantially decrease for different reasons (automation, teleworking, e-learning), but the transport use within the city will become occasional and irregular. Public transport would be used less, the number of privately owned cars will likely to be sliced and traffic jams will become obsolete. Indeed, since we know that "trips for work and education are the main contributors to peek travel" (Transport for NSW, Bureau of Transport Statistics, 2014) and that automation and teleworking will contribute the most to cutting the transit and transit for education will also moderately decrease it, morning and afternoon traffic peaks during weekdays will be mitigated and the traffic pattern will look like weekend traffic pattern, more evenly spread throughout the day, without morning/evening peaks. The overall decrease in transit and traffic jam decrease, especially during morning and afternoon traffic peaks, will make municipal regulations limiting car intercity circulation obsolete and make this means of intercity transit more attractive again in the eyes of the city dweller. At the same time, it is doubtful that this attractiveness will lead to a substantial increase in car traffic for already mentioned reasons.

If this scenario turns out to be true, line-transit public transport will be affected the most, because trips for work and education are routine, every day trips, whereas trips for shopping reasons and leisure are occasional, not systematic. Indeed, even if we cannot completely exclude the necessity for mass transit (many people traveling simultaneously to or from stadiums, concert halls, etc.), which, unlike commute to work or education, are irregular, unsystematic, it is unreasonable to maintain line-transit public transportation only for such purposes. Given the fact that work or learning are the only purposes for regular, everyday transit and that they will substantially decrease for different (automation, teleworking, e-learning) reasons, only the irregular mass transit purposes will remain, thus undermining the necessity for public line-transport. It is not to exclude that the necessity of mass transit for irregular purposes could be eventually replaced by ridesharing services, especially if their fleet would be replenished by minibuses or minivans.

As we have mentioned, car ownership is likely to drop significantly since we know that the main reason of car ownership is commuting to and from work and shopping purposes. Assuming that and knowing that "people without cars travel less overall…", we can advance the idea that not only the car traffic will be sensibly reduced and irregular, but also public transport will be used less, since we know that "…half of all journeys for those living in households without a car are on foot, while 22% were by bus and 12% as a passenger in a car" (Scottish government, 1999). The cheapening car sharing and ridesharing services would certainly attract the new car non-owners as a cheap alternative to the privately owned car and public transport, especially if we assume that cost of those services will continue to drop, as driverless and electric cars will take over the market. This trend will make public transport obsolete as non-competitive, less flexible, less comfortable, less reliable… than the cheap private means of transportation, provided by the new sharing economy services.

Conclusion

The car is considered today as an enemy of the city dwellers. Dirty, noisy, too expensive, too many… But we are on the verge of an era where such views are about to change. Green, cheap, reduced in number and used only occasionally, the car would become an attractive means of transport for city dweller, which would put an end to the public transport.

Expensive operating costs of the private vehicle, parking space, regulations on CO2 emissions, traffic congestion and other factors prolonged the end of public transport, which is still considered as a cheap, clean and quiet convenient means of transport compared to the car. But with the development of new technologies those drawbacks of the car - and as a consequence, federal and municipal regulations limiting car use in the city - will fall apart.

The intercity transit will see a considerable decrease. It is hard to argue that even the increase of urban population will affect this trend. Indeed, automation and teleworking alone (and e-learning), as well as ecommerce advancements, will cut the intercity transit demand by half. Moreover, this will also restructure the traffic and reduce the number of morning/evening traffic jams. This will in fine substantially reduce the car ownership, thus further reducing the number of cars on the streets and therefore sensibly contribute to the decrease in traffic.

Moreover, interconnectivity will further reduce the need to own a personal vehicle, as new opportunities make it possible to get private means of transport "on demand", thus reducing the total number of vehicles and contributing to decongestion of the roads and make such means of transport more attractive again. Ridesharing services (e.g. Uber), which are already comparable to some public transport fees, will cost-effectively replace personally owned cars. Such services will further drop in price, as self-driving and electric cars will take the roads and bring serious competition to the public transport even for long intercity journeys.

In other words, green, cost-effective and as cheap as public transport, the car will put an end to the public transport by curving the modal choice of city riders. This is especially true when we know that private means of transportation will always prevail in customers' modal choice simply because of their flexibility, mobility and polyvalence as compared to the public means of transportation.

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