Nation’s Transportation System Awaits Digital Disruption, Shaping the Future Starts Now

“Americans have yet to wrap their heads around the idea that you could have no car ownership. But mayors all know for a fact that the future of cities will exclude privately owned cars,” observed ZipCar founder and former CEO Robin Chase in her February 6^th talk in Isenberg’s Driven series in Boston.  Private cars, Chase predicted, will disappear from the streets of Paris by 2025. They will also vanish, she speculated, from “dense metropolitan structures” in the U.S. by 2030.

Chase was featured pundit in the second edition of Driven: A Conversation with..., Isenberg’s series of conversations with business innovators at the UMass Club in downtown Boston.  After chatting informally with attendees for 45 minutes, she joined WBUR radio journalist Asma Khalid on stage for a 50-minute discussion of Chase’s challenges as a transportation entrepreneur and of transportation’s increasingly disruptive future. Following the conversation, Chase fielded questions from her audience of more than 100 business practitioners and academics.

A Driverless Urban Future

The change agents in this urban scenario, noted Chase, will be driverless autos and ride sharing. The industry game plan, she continued, calls for self-driven cars’ first penetration of dense urban markets by 2020/2021. “Five years after they hit the streets of Boston, 80% [of all autos] will be switched out,” she predicted. That goes for Cambridge and Brookline too, which will also “switch right over.” “I have no idea about [more distant, less densely populated communities like] Wellesley or Natick,” she confessed.

As for Bostonians, “Why would you continue to own a car when in two minutes you can get a car from here to there? You’ll never have to worry about [or pay for] parking, never maintain it, only pay for the seat. And you won’t have to drive it; you’ll be on your app.” It’s a misconception, she added, to think, “My car’s going to become driverless.” That’s because, dictated by economics and convenience, owning one will prove irrational. And removing the “extreme” cost of the driver from the equation will expand the economic feasibility of ride sharing in both the city and beyond to less densely populated communities.

Extreme Disruption on the Horizon

The disruption ahead, Chase continued, calls for proactive policy making. “We have to get in front of it,” she emphasized. The nation’s 3.5 million truck and delivery drivers, its 680,000 bus drivers, and its taxi drivers (New York City alone has 90,000+) are all at risk, she advised. At the same time, the new transportation system will give “8 million new people [nationwide] access to jobs.” Citing a study, she added that “access to quality transportation has been the single biggest barrier to exiting poverty.”

The coming overhaul, Chase observed, is a subset of the disruption and dislocation accompanying digitized automation in every sector of the economy.  “The ripple effect of automation is everywhere. “The ripple effect of automation is everywhere." I look at it as a wonderful political opportunity to do better [by rethinking our social contract with labor],” she emphasized. “We can’t, [for example], tie all of our social safety nets to full-time labor, because fewer and fewer full-time employed.”

On the operations side, new urban transportation systems will need regulations to zap “zombie cars”—empty vehicles in motion that clog roadways. Cities might also enact policies to regulate unwelcome density created by retail autonomous trips (RATs). Consider the congestion, Chase remarked, of “inventory cruising the streets of Boston.”

Self-driven cars, Chase added, will drastically reduce auto fatalities and serious accidents. Last year, 35,000 deaths and 1.2 million serious accidents plagued America’s highways.  Accident victims, she said, should prove natural advocates for self-driven autos.

An Innovator in the “Sharing” Economy

Zipcar was the first service to bring simplicity to car sharing, Chase told the gathering. From the beginning, invoking a Zipcar, she said, took all of thirty seconds. Today’s “ride-hailing app is a one-button push,” she continued. “What you see today with Zipcar was 99% built the first month.” That was back in 2000—“so incredibly early—a really early use of wireless, not apps.

“You need to ask, what kind of trips are you using a car for?” Chase continued. By and large, you don’t “take Ubers and Lyfts out of the city,” she said. “They are profoundly taxis.”  “I’d never take a Zipcar from Cambridge to Boston, because I wouldn’t want to pay for parking.” On the other hand, “I’d never take an Uber or a Lyft to a client meeting or [from Cambridge] to Walden Pond for a swim. . . I [do] see Zipcar and Uber/Lyft as complementary,” she said.