Sharing Cities Magazine - March 2019

Why did we conduct this research:

Amongst the many transformations that cities worldwide are undergoing, the way people move is one of the most relevant ones. Transportation is found in every citizen daily life, in a way that almost no other service provided by cities is. Hence, transformative cities must match their transportation systems and services and provide better, faster, safer and more sustainable means of transport. In this edition of the Alliance magazine, we dig into Washington D.C.'s transformative policies and its approach to this relevant topic. 

Key findings:

• Transportation is still very heavily related to cars (shift from private to for-hire car services such as Uber or Lyft). This poses the challenge of congestion and pollution.
• Improvements in the public transport networks is still required. At the same time, the behavioral aspect of it (incentivize citizens to stop linking comfort, status and convenience to traditional cars and shift).
• The unknown status of new emerging transport companies (Uber, Grab, etc) goes hand in hand with lacking adequate regulation, which in turn, create an uncertainty atmosphere among citizens.
• Aumomated Vehicles (AVs) are still under-construction (and the legislation regulating them as well), but they must be considered a real possibility in the coming years.

"As a regulator, digital equipment allowed us to collect transportation data that before was unreliable and only existed on paper"

Eric Fidler, CIO DFHV Washington DC

This March, the Sharing Cities Alliance was pleased to have Eric Fidler, CIO at Department For Hire Vehicles in Washington, D.C. as the host of our online seminar. Transportation (or: Mobility) is one of the most well-known and developed fields within the sharing economy. Cities around the world are already shaping their mobility systems, in order for them to fit in the new ecosystem. And this is also the case of Washington, D.C. In this seminar, Eric talked about how D.C. adopted new emerging technologies and platforms, how it is promoting electric vehicles (with the consequent infrastructural changes), and how the city is leveraging big data in order to measure transportation and customer expectations among other topics. Last week, he took some time to answer a few questions. 

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