Two Years In, City Tech’s Advanced Mobility Initiative Continues to Drive Collaborative Innovation 

Our cities’ transportation systems are in a state of disruption. We have multiple modes to choose from – trains, buses, cars, rideshare, bikes, and even scooters – and an increased need to more easily navigate between these systems. Electrification feels just around the corner with the rise of personal, freight, and fleet electric vehicles, raising questions about the infrastructure needed to support them. Meanwhile, next-day and next-hour deliveries are becoming a consumer expectation, causing congestion, increased costs, and pollution. These critical transportation challenges call for coordinated, collaborative action and forward-looking solutions that transform our mobility systems.

Two years ago, City Tech Collaborative (City Tech) launched a new Advanced Mobility Initiative and embarked on a multi-year journey to create more seamless, connected, accessible, and far-reaching urban transportation systems for people and goods. Since 2019, the effort has developed 16 projects and engaged over 70 partners to address mobility challenges affecting cities across the globe.

If we ignore today’s evolving mobility challenges, we can expect a future of increased congestion, longer travel times, and exacerbated transit inequity. Strategy and insights partner McKinsey & Company’s research has shown that without coordinated efforts to mitigate population changes, emerging technologies, and shifting transit trends, by 2030 Chicago residents can expect 25% more passenger miles traveled, a 50% decline in commutes using mass transit, a 16% increase in commute time, and a 15% increase in congestion from today. Cities everywhere face similar challenges, and municipalities, businesses, and residents are calling for targeted, practical solutions to change this grim trajectory.

Urban freight and mobility challenges span sectors, jurisdictions, industries, and residents, and local conditions and priorities determine whether solutions will or will not work for any given community. City Tech creates the structure necessary for collaborative innovation through our solution development methodology; working with cross-sector partners, we bring multiple perspectives to the table to discover opportunities, define and implement new solutions, and scale to new markets. This approach helps our solutions thrive where other collaborations fall short.

Led by Founding Members Bosch, HERE Technologies, and Microsoft, City Tech’s Advanced Mobility Initiative is integrating leading research, emerging technology, and cities’ transportation priorities to develop comprehensive solutions. With leadership and input from national and international partners – including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, London, and more than 25 industry and civic partners – City Tech developed an urban transportation innovation roadmap that guides our efforts to solve today’s most pressing mobility challenges.

With this framework in place, the Advanced Mobility Initiative has developed activities related to multimodal connectivity , public transit access , freight , smart infrastructure management , electric mobility, and AV/drone adoption. Solutions have ranged from managing congestion at city curbs to providing real-time insights on bus occupancy. The Initiative has also worked to integrate the parking industry more fully into broader mobility systems through the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab. Anchored at the largest underground public parking system in North America, the Innovation Lab’s Founding Members Millennium Garages, SP+, and Arrive are leading the effort to expand the Initiative’s reach through additional solutions to optimize electric vehicle charging, improve indoor mapping and wayfinding, and position parking facilities as urban freight and mobility hubs.

In parallel with technology integration and deployment, the Advanced Mobility Initiative is also working to ensure that the solutions we create are inclusive, accessible, and scalable across urban markets. City Tech’s thought leadership programming and publications amplify Advanced Mobility Initiative participants’ work through roundtables, workshops, conferences, and virtual events that have reached hundreds of national subject experts and city leaders. City Tech’s resident engagement program solicits direct resident input on challenges and solutions that affect their communities. As part of our solution development methodology, City Tech projects follow a racial equity and inclusion process and toolkit established to ensure that the need for and impact of new solutions are understood by collaborative partners. These tools ensure that we are evaluating racial equity and inclusion throughout the course of all of our projects, as well as across the larger portfolio. Together, these efforts inform, validate, and assess our work as it relates to the Advance Mobility Initiative’s vision of seamless and frictionless transportation systems.

At its outset, the Advanced Mobility Initiative sought to address the most important transportation issues facing our cities, but no one could have anticipated exactly how these last two years would unfold. City Tech and our partners have adapted our approach in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and industry-shaping trends, incorporating several key learnings along the way.

1.) Expanding Roles, Responsibilities, and Opportunities: Cities’ mobility systems are a complex web of tech companies, public and private transit providers, asset owners and operators, and government agencies that make our trips possible every day. The Advanced Mobility Initiative provides a framework for these stakeholders to work together to integrate services, focus on residents’ needs, and improve their customers’ experience. Our future seamless transportation system will not be governed by a single provider; we must create and expand roles, responsibilities, and opportunities for each of these groups, together.

2.) Seizing New Opportunities to Shape Transportation Demand: Historically, transportation service providers have sought to keep up with demand by adding more vehicles, routes, or services. Predictive modeling tools help reduce uncertainty, but they still cast service providers in a reactive role. In addition to improving supply-side intelligence, City Tech and our partners are embracing opportunities to proactively shape demand through data sharing and incentives. Demand shaping can take the form of sharing previously inaccessible information with customers and partners, nudging public transit commuters to adjust their travel plans, or using data and dynamic pricing to manage curb space. By learning from other sectors such as consumer products and energy that have invited their customers to take an active part in product or solution development, urban transportation can deliver better user experiences and reduce operating cost. Achieving this elusive goal, however, demands new capabilities, tools, policies, and partnerships to put information and physical assets to their highest and best use.

3.) Applying Fundamental Tech Capabilities to Specific Transportation Challenges : Recent breakthroughs in fundamental technologies – including connected sensors, big data management, edge compute, 5G, artificial intelligence, and machine learning – are finally finding their way into urban transportation. Large technology companies have invested heavily in these transformational capabilities, but it’s up to local governments, fleet and freight operators, and urban residents to help ensure that new tools are deployed in ways that are useful, relevant, and respectful of unique community needs and expectations. As cities and their partners move from single solutions to building broader innovation portfolios with diverse use cases, focusing on these foundational technology layers can create efficiencies and support broader partnerships at scale. Raw tech may get us 80% of the way to game-changing solutions, but customizing fundamental capabilities to fit local conditions is the cultural and intellectual “last mile” of transportation innovation.

4.) Scaling Beyond the Pilot: A successful pilot is encouraging. Now how do we take it to the next level? We must design solutions for scalability from the very beginning – and include the right partners to achieve it. In addition to tech and data partners, it is critical we include organizations with expertise or specific capabilities to take a solution to market and scale to other cities. With a focus on enterprise implementation, this solution team member can best scope, define, and evaluate metrics, successes, and shortcomings relative to future implementation. We must also identify subsequent funding and/or investment sources who are able to finalize post-pilot product development and customization required for enterprise implementation. Engaging the right partners, focusing on broader applications, and priming markets and future customers allow solutions to thrive far beyond an initial pilot.

5.) Focusing on the End Users: Successful public-facing technologies rely upon direct resident engagement and community-focused design. The Advanced Mobility Initiative drove specific efforts such as our partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago Innovation Center to define public transit needs and potential solutions. Students took a user-centered approach to understand the pains and gains of using public transit; by speaking with residents, understanding the experiences of different types of users, and taking a cross-disciplinary approach, students were able to discover inequities and identify solutions for specific demographics and marginalized customers. Prioritizing equity, accessibility, and meeting gaps for users will always lead to a stronger and more impactful solutions.

Despite all that the Advanced Mobility Initiative has achieved, there is still so much to do. We will identify the partnerships and technologies that can support innovative funding models for shared, efficient mobility options that reduce our climate impact. Consistent with our work to date, we will be exploring opportunities to reveal the use and demand for transportation – opening a dialogue around how these data and tools can be used to guide the planning, investment, and operations of our shared infrastructure to meet our community goals.

The last two years have ushered dramatic changes in how people and goods move about cities, placing new demands on service providers, infrastructure, and regulators. As post-COVID activity resumes, that pace of change will only increase. Vehicle electrification is reaching a long-awaited tipping point. Though full automation may still be years away, connected vehicles will begin to share and receive an unprecedented volume of information with each other and their surroundings. Increasing competition for urban streets and curbs will force cities to rethink pricing, management, and integration of public and private spaces. All of these trends (and more) will ensure plenty of need for continued innovation, collaboration, new market development, community engagement, and thoughtful deployment.

Urban mobility systems are already complicated, and collaboration is difficult. But City Tech’s Advanced Mobility Initiative proves that when we work together, committed partners can build lasting, dynamic solutions with greater impact than anyone could accomplish alone.

For more information about City Tech’s Advanced Mobility Initiative, visit https://www.citytech.org/mobility or contact City Tech at Collaborate@CityTech.org to get involved.

About City Tech Collaborative
City Tech Collaborative (City Tech) is an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone. City Tech’s work uses IoT sensing networks, advanced analytics, and urban design to create scalable, market ready solutions. Current initiatives address mobility, healthy cities, connected infrastructure, and emerging growth opportunities. City Tech was born and raised in Chicago, and every city is a potential partner. Visit www.CityTech.org for more information and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About the Advanced Mobility Initiative
City Tech Collaborative’s Advanced Mobility Initiative is an effort involving over 25 industry partners to create a more seamless and frictionless transportation system with increased accessibility and reach for urban residents. The Initiative includes six impact areas that City Tech will address through thought leadership, resident engagement, and solution development.

Advanced Mobility Initiative Founding Members include Bosch, HERE Technologies and Microsoft.
McKinsey & Company serves as Strategy and Insights Partner.
Industry Leads and Strategic Partners include: Millennium Garages, National Express Group, AECOM, Crown Castle, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Intel, Verizon, Smarking, SP+, Arrive, Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Transportation Research, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the City of Chicago, CityBase Inc., the Illinois Autonomous Vehicles Association, Innova EV, London and Partners, the Metropolitan Planning Council, MobilityE3, MUVE Inc ., Northwestern University’s Transportation Center, project44, the Shared Use Mobility Center, SpotHero, and Via Transportation.