Creating a Passion for Global Change in Mobility

Deloitte's Future of Mobility team had the honor of hosting a remarkable delegation of South African transportation leaders at our 30 Rock headquarters in NYC. This impressive group of women leaders crafting the future of mobility in South Africa, is participating in a global immersion tour that included stops in Rio de Janeiro and New York, sponsored by South Africa’s Transportation Education Training Authority and the University of Pretoria. Its aim is to advance senior management talent across the transportation sector and support women leaders in a traditionally male-dominated industry. The group included a highly diverse cross-section of the mobility ecosystem, including rail, freight, maritime, aerospace, emergency management, regulation, air traffic service, retail, logistics, and information management. 

We had a spirited and all-too-brief discussion. It was fascinating to uncover the many common issues we collectively face in advancing mobility, as well as the differences in how those challenges manifest in the US and South Africa. 

For example, there was widespread agreement that mobility can have an increasingly transformative impact by improving safety and health, creating jobs, and fostering access to economic opportunity. The nature of those impacts, and what tradeoffs we might be willing to make, will vary, however. We all recognize the potential for new mobility technologies to disrupt large swaths of the workforce. But in a country where nearly 1-in-3 people is unemployed, the costs of that disruption grow all the more acute. Safety is an issue everywhere, but when very real concerns about personal physical safety deter residents from using new cycling infrastructure or taking public transit, as we heard from our guests, the required solutions look very different.

A powerful part of our conversation centered around disruptive digital technologies that possess the potential to transform many global economies and, in Africa and beyond, enable a leapfrogging of traditional paths to growth. At the same time, there is a realization that the basic building blocks of mobility—physical infrastructure like roads and bridges—can’t be overlooked. The delegation certainly recognized the potential, and in many ways saw South Africa as a leader in digital technologies (smartphone use is ubiquitous, for example). But they were also realistic about the challenges that remain—a smartphone is of limited use if data plans are prohibitively expensive, for example.

The session overall was a powerful reminder that mobility is profoundly local, and that to build a more inclusive mobility ecosystem there needs to be greater diversity in the leadership driving these discussions. I travel across the globe and meet with organizations from every corner of the mobility ecosystem. Nonetheless, my views—all our views—are inextricably linked to our own experiences and history. We need to see different faces, hear different voices and view the challenges and opportunities thorough completely different lenses than just our own immediate environment.

As we’ve done with the World Economic Forum and a number of other key players in the global mobility ecosystem, we look forward to continuing to convene these types of candid conversations. And even more importantly, I came away incredibly optimistic that together we can drive global change towards our shared goal of enabling cleaner, faster, cheaper and safer movement of people and goods.