Webinar - Future of Mobility

uh one single person um especially an expert to tell you what the future will be but we will try to um let's open up a little bit uh both of these aspects today so uh there isn't in in I mean intentionally we have chosen to have both of these uh words um in the title to be plural so both Futures are plural and Mobility is of course plural and has quite a lot to do with many other things that will be talking about today so I do come from School of Engineering but we're trying to teach a new generations of Engineers here at Altos to not just think about technical aspects but to think much more broadly so um I hope that will be partly also conveyed through my through my talk so overall we have these three four uh key themes to talk about today and then we can end with a brief discussion of some 15-20 minutes so I'll first try to open up a little bit of these ongoing Dynamics um in the mobility sector at large of course in our society large they're always intertwined and then we'll um discuss a little bit about relationship towards this um whole notion of futures or multiple features with the comparison of let's say prediction versus foresight or sort of how do we usually think about futures then I'll show you a little bit of um some key insights from a recent project we had about Finnish near Futures 2030s and will end with some kind of short list of key actions at least based on not just that project but on various other research projects that we have done here at Alto so yeah let's start with this uh part so um the ongoing non-linear Dynamics and it's quite important to underline this non-linear because that's partly what will be also talking about when we go back to the question of foresight oftentimes in these the domain of future studies we like to talk about three Horizons that are simultaneously interacting so you have in a sense old paradigms are degrading the new paradigms that are emerging so this can be of course social paradigms but technological paradigms as well and oftentimes we forget how long it took for various technologies that we have in our everyday life to be here so they are kind of converging evolving building upon each other oftentimes in very unpredictable ways so but before we jump into some details of Mobility proper I want to emphasize that uh this is how we of course try to look at the the system nowadays so the transporter the mobility system by itself is not isolated from the rest of the the environment and especially land use or spatial planning at large is actually number one transport measure if you want as well we'll come back to that later but basically this is an interacting system so this graph shows that a sort of recursive interaction between on the bottom line bottom side you have sort of the land use system size the side that has this line development and and land utilization and on the upper side you have the transportation system with the travel demand and trip making so they are of course interfacing through various various components the key aspect that we're nowaday is talking about is accessibility so our people able to access various destinations that they need in their everyday life and that of course has direct implications on their activity participation in their uh daily daily life which of course at the core the core of that is uh various behavior that we have in our everyday life so as much as as much as this is about a system perspective we have already we can already here see that sort of the user or the resident perspective is already there and it's quite important and this interplay between the system and the the user is something that we I still have to deal with all the time but then when we talk about transport Technologies or Mobility Technologies overall we have to remember um that they're usually appearing and reappearing in uh various ways as we as we oftentimes call them so these waves take decades anywhere between um one and and several decades that's how long it took of course to um in some locations to switch from horses from horses to cars um but then that's not necessarily always again uh limit linear as we would like it to be so if you think about a lot of these technologies that we are in a sense discussing nowadays as potential Solutions for example um electric vehicles or later on we will be talking about briefly um yeah some like them some don't electric scooters they're all Technologies basically from the 19th century so they're not necessarily new the way you would consider some other things to be new nowadays so they have been there they're just sort of they have their waves haven't really succeeded for various reasons not necessarily just technological uh purely technological reasons back in those days so even with on the right figure here we can see demand responsive transport which is basically one of the quite important uh Mobility Services in various not just cities but also rural areas and even as you can see many of them are sort of they have a long time span since they're active but we also see a big amount of of these systems fail over time so as much as this is about success we oftentimes see only the success but oftentimes or maybe even more it's about actually failure of these various Technologies so where I initially started my kind of Journey in this technological domain was with so-called automated vehicles and the emphasis here is on the point that this should be plural they're they're not just automated cars but they could come in various shapes and and sizes of course we already have automated Vehicles they're usually in Metro systems or in other kind of high right of way rail systems so there are some some lessons only to be learned learned from there but of course the emphasis here it's not necessarily on the vehicle itself but more on on the environment where this or the service and also this vehicle is is providing so I think we we have to really think about them in this kind of we use the concept of operating those design domain we don't have to um go to technical uh here but basically it forces us to think not about the vehicle but about what's the point with this vehicle what kind of uh people and trips it is supposed to be serving so um besides that um I have personal also worked on Mobility as a service it's probably you have heard at least some of you the concept around Finland as it originates in The Finnish context is basically is a continuation of a long trajectory that we have long wave in in Mobility systems that basically we need higher and higher levels of integration and customization in the Mobility Services so integration means not just sort of physical integration between different modes which is of course Very fundamental very important because without that without actually having a place where um you know the bus meets the train and the bike sharing system and the taxi and whatever else is is there these sort of Mobility hubs a little bit very difficult to talk about Mass so um so but as you go higher and higher up the level we start talking more about information integration transaction or booking payment ticketing integration all these other levels that we actually need to achieve to have um this be as seamless as possible however of course um it's not an easy thing by itself because oftentimes any anytime you talk about integration that requires some trade-offs to be done in the in the built environment and regarding the the the service itself so that's in in a sense in some opposition with the customization effort because of course we want service to be customized for different needs and that's the tricky part usually in our Mobility systems that these needs are different because people are different so yeah and then um we have we have started recent dollars to work on on micro mobility and as I said um nowadays we have seen a surge of electric scooters in in senior cities and I I understand there are divided opinions about them um but we have also been doing various observations with sort of cameras video recording and it's actually not just I mean you have probably noticed that it's not just electric scooters but there is more and more of these other sorts of um battery electric vehicles like this mono wheel or motorcycle and electric skateboards and and various other sorts of things um that are being nowadays sold on the market mostly because of I mean partly because of advances in Battery Technology but also because of various other emerging business models and and I guess General Trends in society uh that have pushed this but that's something that we will uh actually try to summarize next but the bottom line is that of course we are kind of I mean these are just examples of of some technologies that we have been researching in Alto and and there are more for us an entry into thinking about Mobility than not of course the end themselves that's why we're just I'm showing them at the very beginning there will not be at the end of this talk today but one way um as a sort of a state of the art nowadays in transport and Mobility studies of how we try to deal with with these various Dynamics over time is this is this is some work that comes originally from the Netherlands um it's called multi-level perspective if you want to find more about that but the multi multi-level is that these three levels that the figure here presents there are some other versions of the figure where the levels are are flipped I personally like this one because it shows but the bottom uh this socio-technical landscape level is maybe sort of broader broader trends that we have so I mean in our context of course in the nordics for example it would be aging societies is a clearly a demographic uh Trend but then other trends like um pandemics are of course something that appears on that on that bottom level and there are oftentimes they create pressures basically uh for these other other layers so and the middle layer is more of the layer of the current social technical system that's sort of in the in the inter intertwines industry culture policy user Behavior technology and and everything else so that's we can think about it as the mobility system that is now and oftentimes that system has a tendency to stay on its on its path um as much as possible of course until landscape pressures uh amount like covet was of course an obvious pressure on the mobility regime but also Mobility changes due to these this third level level that is up there which is this um Niche innovation level will where basically new technologies like those that I was just showing before new business models but of most importantly new Behaviors new values that might be emerging into society are sort of looking for a foot uh to gain inside of the the system so it's basically both of these forces together the landscape pressures and the niche precious and of course if we actively look for opening and nurturing these windows of opportunity within the current social technical system we have a chance to to change it and and push it in a certain more desirable uh Direction so as as part of our own studies and this is just a short um it looks like a short list it's a sort of long in some ways but um if we go back and start thinking about is transport just about me moving around of course it is about that but it's also about a lot of other actors in The Society who will have to change something or maybe they will have to change quite a lot in their own ways of working and and even kind of uh how they're how they're usually uh doing things and that's partly the nature of Mobility system itself that it's not just about the transport of people or Goods on themselves but it's also about all the other a plethora of other organizations that are in a sense uh dependent on on that system so bottom line we're kind of dealing with a with a systemic um a question in our you know in our hands so with that in mind I would like to um at least if for some of you might be useful to at least distinguish between prediction and foresight as sort of a relationship towards future and prediction is something that we are still nowadays Elijah is relying on but I would argue that we need more of foresight as opposed to prediction especially in these times of of non-linear Dynamics and as I said I'm just a simple engineer so these so physicist physicists are usually much smarter than or wiser should I say than Engineers so here's a quote from from a physicist that prediction is very difficult especially if it's about the future if it's a bit it's a bit ironic but I like it um as a sort of a emphasizing that a whole point of difficulty of predicting the future and wise is of course difficult to predict the future well we have started to kind of hint hint that but we have to put a bit more substance to the whole notion of Mobility system being complex and and complex doesn't mean complicated you have complicated machines I mean your your phone is a complicated machine most likely you yourself don't understand uh all the different parts that that go into it and how do they work but it's still very predictable well largely predictable then let's say a Mobility system and of course complexities should also not be confused with chaos so we're talking about something that is um between chaos and complete organization and we call it organized complexity it sounds um maybe strange but that's what it is and it basically means that we have um these sorts of Dynamics so we oftentimes think or are at least our minds are so that we we we can only think about sort of individual factors and we do forget that these factors are in a sense dependent on each other that a affects B that b effects C but then C affects a again back so that's why we end up having various kinds of third second and third order impacts that's it's not just about sort of direct impacts especially when we when we deal with with human behavior and part of this is also that Dynamics can can be on various time scales so some impacts are sort of very short term and some are very long term and of course overall we are at it's called uh stage when there are also other various non-linear dynamics that come as we go back to the the ml the multi-level perspective picture there again more and more factors coming into them the picture complicating um or making making the the picture more complex basically so that makes the whole system very difficult to in a sense completely defined or measure I oftentimes um when I talk to our students we oftentimes come to the point that we are in a sense chasing the shadow of the of the mobility system we're always like one step behind we can never see it completely as it is happening um at the moment or as we as soon as we're about to make a decision the system is already in the next state and that of course also means this fundamental property of complex system is is there are a lot of um unknown unknowns so a lot of things that we are of course there are there we kind of know there there but we don't really know what these factors are affecting uh human behavior especially human behavior and besides that the very other fundamental uh point is um if you think about future uh people have been thinking about future that's what makes us human uh this sort of capability to to imagine um on the ones so this is in a sense a kind of a overlay of of two graphs where on the left side you have this pad dependence graph and on the on the right side is more of the Futures cone the so-called Futures cone graph so it basically shows system over time that as we have seen in the past in the 19th century there has been a lot of different uh vehicles and possibilities for the mobility system to emerge but then we have now locked it in a certain path so we have now built our our Mobility systems largely around private cars and that has brought many advantages but also many disadvantages at the same time so now we're at this stage where we have to sort of think or rethink how do we move away from this this path and that's basically what will be go back to uh to the prediction but it at this point is what is future or this Futures uh space it's basically a space you have to think about it um conceptually on that level and all these dots on the right side are basically possible futures uh that um or sort of Futures that could happen there are some of them are sort of more probable some of them are uh uh more sort of on the domain of just being possible and of course some of them are even more sort of disruptive and and um uncertain and overall but the point is that they are not necessarily um just clearly adding up to each other there in in quite a big um and large space at the end of the day it's of course good to um recognize that it's it's not easy to sort of put a number on on these Futures and that's why we do tend to talk about in a sense this space being infinite so there's sort of a very very large set of possibilities so when you're sort of dealing with the fact that there are all these um possible features the fact is how do we then systematically deal with that yeah with just say oh whatever happens happens that's a coin every time we have to make a decision or do we start building some some ways of of handling that and especially for for um when we think about Futures it's not just about possibilities or probabilities but most important by this what are the desirable features that we should be discussing about and going towards so um this is just a brief example of of this process so on the upper left side if you have this sort of thinking about the future and you just rely on forecasting from within the existing trends of population or employment or other sorts of things you will have a tendency to sort of think about aha okay I'm kind of predicting the future this is the future I'm planning for I'm making my decisions for that future it gives you a sense of certainty maybe at that point and maybe that's that's nice and normal to sort of look for that sense of certainty but we kind of know it doesn't really work like that exactly because of all the other previous points so um in a sense it's it's quite an absurd state to be in to seek certainty in um in the whole process of of dealing with with the mobility future so instead of that we have to really sit down and explore that futures space and of course and infinity is a very big number so we're not supposed to sort of deal with with this as a sort of infinity by itself but we have structured ways and I'll show you later on these four field scenarios that you can see here appearing um in in figure B so there are these kinds of um four Fields they're just an example of of critical extreme points in in possible possible Futures and they're much more there to enable discussion to to move towards part C of this figure which is about what is the preferred what is the what is the desirable future we want to steer towards and what are the features we want to avoid because this is large laws about undesired undesired Futures and then once we have a bit Clear Vision on on this kind of normative scenario normative future normative Vision we can try to work our way backwards to the present which is then um some kind of um back casting from uh from the that desired Target future towards towards the present uh but I can briefly um show you an example of of this uh application so we have done a project you can easily find it if you search for Lee kepalo there's a nice report there that should have a lot of different things for anyone who is curious to learn about the mobility system at large about these these methods that we are briefly discussing here and and of course a lot of different findings that are also covered um today but more beyond beyond that and um I'm not going to get into this uh fear uh into nitty-gritty details but basically um we have tried to also develop a bit of um a practical a framework of different methods that we need to combine together in order to think much more creatively and uh and you know sort of better better way of anticipating all those features and and various impacts so I'm as an engineer or as more of a systems engineer I'm not a stuck to one single one single method but let's say this this framework was supposed to include a range of different methods you can use to have more of these exploratory Futures including also public participation because we shouldn't fall into this trap to think that public is is not um wise enough to to think about a possible and desirable Futures and that and of course besides the kind of exploratory Futures we we have to think also about various impacts and and maybe there to put some numbers on them just for the sake of comparison not because we are completely certain about those numbers but more about kind of relative a relative comparison and that's more on the on the kind of the right upper upper right side and then on the bottom bottom side is more uh well what do we do with that once we kind of know these sorts of uh things like what kinds of Futures might there be and what are their impacts uh what we should do regarding that so yeah if you want to look uh further into that I warmly recommend you to look up a lake apala report so I'll just just show you a bit of Snippets from there so we have went and gathered various kinds of driving forces so of course most important societal forces that can range quite a lot actually in in the scale of human behavior so they go all the way from let's say living and working preferences to questions of like various acceptance of Technologies or or kind of perspectives on cyber crime or or gender Norms or various other sorts of things that are not just about transport but of course they affect transport so we know that office dress code um can affect people are cycling to work or not of course that simultaneously is shaped by the fact that are there also facilities to change your clothes in the office so anyway the point was that um this is just a sort of a a shopping list of different factors that we have been trying to identify as part of this project societal environmental Economic and Business and the usual to other suspects are technological or infrastructural aspects and then policy and governance so we can of course besides systematically trying to organize these these factors we can also try to assign what what is the level of uncertainty that they have and what is the level of sort of strength or impact they have usually in them in the mobility system and based on that you can try to develop basically the core access of of the Futures uh fourfold futures um scenario table and that's basically what happens next so the if you go back again to the fact that this is an infinite space but we're not trying to deal with infinity as um that's a difficult number in itself uh the point of these four scenarios is not that there are four futures but there are sort of four distant enough points in that Futures Landscapes that they're kind of relatively among each other allowing us to then discuss them and then to be able to say well maybe we we're trying to go more towards this kind of a future maybe avoid that kind of a future uh if you want yeah and if you want to have a key takeaway message from from here it's that you shouldn't try to just have these scenarios built around Technologies I often see that and I I think that's um sometimes a mistake because technology is in transport are never just by themselves shaping um the system they usually come they usually come with behavior so that was mostly the the access we had the horizontal axis that we had which is more about sort of what kind of services and behaviors will be seeing and then this other access was more about sort of how will the governance system respond given the of course larger and wider context of particular economic context in this case so um I mean I will leave this material for you to to read we don't have to read through all of these different scenarios this is just one one of those that is more talking about travel chains for the masses so there is in a sense a bit of a narrative so that's part of the a method to try to write down the narrative to force yourself to to think about this kind of coherent future so it's not just about these individual points allowing you to compare them among themselves but they also themselves have to be coherent internally coherent features they have to make sense at the end of the day and that's why I'm sort of writing them out and later on quantitatively analyzing them allows us to kind of say formally okay this this is really a possible future that we could we could have so then if you sort of outlay them one one next to each other so then this one is much more sort of a kind of infrastructure for individuals oriented and um of course you can see that the upper in both parts um we kind of talk about Urban environment but also the the rural environment in Finland and what kind of changes might happen in in both of those cases so for each of these scenarios it wasn't um just kind of expert stakeholders being involved in them we have also involved the public we have a public participation workshops to try to sort of double check these to do they make sense are we sort of missing something here um or are they sort of um uh are there also some possibilities that that could could be easily overlooked because we are too much in depth in sort of our own expert thinking so yeah basically um that's the kind of the core of the of the methods as I said you might want to go check the report for for further uh further details but if I move now towards um well at the end of the day I'm still engineer so I'm not just about understanding the world but this is also about sort of doing something about this um so we have some kind of General key actions or lessons Lessons Learned so especially when we talk about um present-day Mobility system there's a large consensus in international research community that we have this sort of hierarchy of of actions and um they're they're framed this avoid shift and improve so basically they avoid part is about avoiding or reducing uh travel of course what kind of travel usually sort of Highly highly carbon or energy intensive travel and then trying also to shift Mobility to more energy efficient modes and more healthier modes overall and then only towards the end to think about improving uh vehicle Technologies such as electric vehicles so um I don't know um if this is if this might come as a surprise to some people but electric vehicles by themselves are not uh not the solution or not the top solution that we're we're looking for and if you kind of again go back to what are we supposed to be doing with well there is a range of these different instruments uh planning regulatory economic information and investment instruments overall and to go back to the to the first um to one of the first slides actually land use planning is the number one instrument for Mobility planning and that really emphasizes uh the need to kind of integrate these fields and move Beyond those move Beyond those silos um but of course um I would be very bad engineer if I just imposed some kind of a top-down uh picture so at the same time as we're trying to think about this avoid shift improve framework we really need to think about what are the different groups of people we oftentimes use this word personas um that we should really take into account regarding fairness of this um change in the mobility Mobility system especially regarding their Mobility experience their everyday life basically so kind of uh the the never-ending lesson of um of justice theory or morality theories we have to uh take care of the least advantaged uh in the society whatever those least advantaged people are at that very um moment so it's not just about majority usually majority in Mobility systems is sort of able-bodied middle-aged uh working people sort of commuting to work and so on and that's largely been the Persona that we have been designing our Transport Systems uh towards but of course we know that there are a lot of other different different people but again it's not an infinite number of these different people that's a bit of a struggle so we shouldn't just talk about one imagined user or millions or five and a half million of users um so personas as a sort of a thinking framework gives us a reasonable number that an individual human can think about it's somewhere around somewhere between 5 and 15. um so that it's enough to kind of actually start discussing distributive impacts but also uh it's not just you know sort of singular uh imagined uh hypothetical uh you average user that rarely exists uh by herself or himself and that of course pushes us to really think about the details that we are kind of planning and designing because oftentimes again Engineers I mean I'm kind of turning really much the Gaze towards um my own tribe have oftentimes we tend to focus on some kind of Mega projects and and big things in big infrastructure and big Investments and big this and that um sort of massive massive projects but then we sort of forget that it's oftentimes the details are in or what matters the fact that some seat is of a certain size or or that there is this five centimeters gap between and the platform and the bus that was was there just because it wasn't really properly thought of or the fact that the bike lane is half a meter to uh short in in width it doesn't allow um for sort of a wheelchair or a person or two people uh cycling side by side so sort of these kinds of details of course are something we should be paying attention to the third uh key action or sort of a lesson that I would underline is that um the change is not just about phasing or adding things into our system and oftentimes that's usually the kind of the key yeah so um if I take a recent recent work with um with Helsinki on on electric scooters so it's not just about the fact that now we have we should put Alexis scooters in the city and that provides some kind of a alternative Mobility option for for some people but um I mean anyone who knows or deals with with planning knows that space is always a resource it's a limited resource in the city so even to that sort of natural a simple fact you have to understand that okay we kind of also have to take some things out or in this case it's called phase out that's the usually the word we're we're using so um I think it in general it's not just beyond that very example but in general it's not just about providing certain certain options and some kind of in a sense uh um Alternatives of of Mobility um but it's also about trying to actively change some some of the current Uh current system and and try to in a sense phase it out so clear examples are uh parking uh norms and street parking and that's something that sort of many cities are nowadays Awakening to the fact that it's really a waste of of resources and um there are many more better ways of how how that space can be used and um if I sort of move now more um towards what is also very important so it's not just about changes in the city but it's also how do we get to those changes so it's about procedures it's about processes eventual institutions that we have and I here have one or two key recommendations so one of these is that we have to think about a new organizational roles or inter-organizational roles this is just an example of Transport technology strategies position in uh in La we can of course think about many other roles if we go back to that notion that we need to integrate more land use and transport planning uh in in practice so it goes all the way to that level to really think about sort of new roles new actors in The in these various networks that make make decisions but also to kind of go back and ask what are the roles of the state actors in this in these in these various networks we have also done a little bit of a study on on this and asked um in the Finish expert Community what are the sort of perceived or desired roles of the state actors and the desired ones are here in blue so facilitator mitigator or enabler of societal engagement which in my mind makes makes a lot of sense and some of them are even written down in the law while these these these two in Orange opportunist and gatekeeper are of course less desired roles of the state actor so bottom line is that besides the fact that we should be talking about change in the build environment in the mobility system we also have to simultaneously think about how do we change our institutions to correspond to those uh desired uh changes in the everyday experience inability system yeah so um a long story short um I will try to conclude now and I will conclude with a very short point going back to this whole idea of futures is um it turns out the best way to predict the future is to actually create it and I hope um that some of the points that I was talking about today will give you some food for thought on how how you know what kind of lessons or best practices we have about crafting these desired features so that's all I had to say today it would be great if we would have some questions and discussion now

2023-07-01 22:54

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