| SMART CITIES & PARKING
A transportation tsunami is about to
sweep through the streets of your
city. You might not have felt it yet. But
the rumblings are getting louder.
Car manufacturers know it’s coming and are
frantically placing bets on urban mobility
solutions that hedge their decades-old
investments into human-driven automobiles.
In the past two years, Toyota has invested
US$500m in Uber and US$1bn into Uber’s South-
East Asian competitor Grab, while BMW
acquired parking payments platform ParkMobile
in 2018 and Volkswagen took a controlling stake
in WirelessCar in the same year. The world’s
biggest tech companies also know this
disruptive wave is coming and are seizing the
initiative by investing in autonomous vehicle
technology such as Waymo, electric scooter
companies such as Lime Scooters and ridehailing
platforms like Didi Chuxing. City
authorities have no doubt that a sea change
is on the horizon as they scramble to rewrite
decades-old legislation for the realities of the
‘sharing’ economy, the ‘gig’ economy and the
‘who-knows-what’s-next’ economy.
History repeating itself?
We saw this movie play out a century ago
and the ending was more dramatic than anyone
could have ever imagined. At the turn of the last
century, the modes of transport in most of the
world’s major cities were either horse, cart, tram,
bicycle or shoe leather. Pollution in cities like
London, Paris and New York was reaching
uninhabitable levels. Horse manure – not carbon
monoxide — was the culprit. In 1890, one wellknown
pundit predicted that if a solution was
not found quickly, equine excrement would
be piled up to the third floor of Manhattan’s
balconies by 1930. As it turned out, in that same
predicted timeframe, most of those four-legged
vehicles had been replaced by four-wheelers
Annual Showcase 2020 | Intertraffic World 055