Mobility and Its Discontents
Battered by COVID, the Mobility-as-a-Service vision meets another enemy—real life.
September 17, 2020 -- The era of mobility, as envisioned by Detroit and Silicon Valley just a few years ago, would have decoupled vehicle ownership and vehicle usage. Consumers would no longer purchase a vehicle and keep it in their garage; instead, they would purchase Mobility-as-a-Service—which would comprise everything from rideshare to mass transit to electric bikes and scooters to automated, driverless taxi services—and pay on demand as need arose.
On the surface, it made a lot of sense—if autonomous driving capability was real and commercially viable, it seemed rather wasteful to purchase an expensive piece of steel and rubber and let it go unused 95% of the time. Why let so much capital go to waste when it could be on the road, picking up passengers and making money? Tesla started writing software to turn its Model S and X into robo-taxis. Ford rebranded itself as a mobility provider instead of an automaker, and bought e-scooter operator Spin. Uber invested heavily into Lime, another scooter startup. Volvo and Cadillac built one-stop-shop subscription services, wherein you pay a monthly fee to access any vehicle in their catalog. GM bought shares in Lyft, which in turn bought shares in bike-share operator Motivate, and then doubled its efforts by launching Maven, an OEM-run car share service. It was going to be a beautiful, digitally seamless world of intermodal transit, and personal car ownership was as good as dead.
Then 2020 happened.
It’s tempting to say that COVID-19 put a pause on this vision of sharing and co-owning and common use. While the pandemic is certainly part of the story, in truth the mobility vision had deep cracks in it long before anyone ever heard of the coronavirus. There are at least two reasons to think that Mobility-as-a-Service was never fully up to the task of total car replacement, and one of them has a lot to do with Starbucks.
Howard Schultz, Starbucks’s founder, envisioned the coffee shop as a “third place”—a rest stop between home and work; a place to recharge before diving into domestic duties or workplace chaos. For many people, this island of rest is and will always be their car. Our automobiles are the closest thing we have to a portable and flexible private space; while some of us are accustomed to thinking of the commute as an unsavory element of workaday drudgery, months of working from home have made many realize the value of this retreat. This is not to say that a shared mobility service cannot provide similar peace and privacy—Starbucks, after all, is a shared space—but there are genuine benefits in the stability and predictability of driving a car you own to your place of business.
Which brings us directly to the second reason for why Mobility-as-a-Service always had a bit of an uphill climb against private car ownership—stuff. Your sunglasses, Altoids, inhalers, water bottles, Bluetooth transmitters, old iPhone chargers; your cereal bars, eye drops, tire pressure gauges, gloves; in some parts of the country, your firearms. The miscellaneous articles that make our daily life run smoothly also require physical space—an informally designated, easily remembered, easily accessible location. This is to say nothing of families with children, for whom the amount of stuff is on an entirely different level— juice boxes, snacks, car seats, strollers, toys, stickers. Imagine keeping track of all these things if they have no designated space. Even worse, imagine loading all that stuff into a shared mobility service vehicle—and not the same one that you had yesterday. The car, whether or not we realize it, is an outlet of our homes—not just a means of transit but a repository of the things we need most while in transit. In truth, the most seamless, most disruptive, most connected mobility service actually only meets the first half of that need. The other half, almost by definition, has to come from the ownership, or at the least long-term custody, of a vehicle.
Certainly, the impact of the COVID pandemic on mobility merits its own discussion. It’s safe to say that going forward, consumers will be more sensitive to sharing anything with anyone (indeed, how passé now seems the ‘sharing economy’ that was on its way to change in the world in 2011). This hesitation applies to riding in an Uber, even an autonomous one, as much as it does to grabbing the handles on a shared scooter.
Consider, too, that one of the secondary effects of COVID—a massive shift to working from home— delivers still another blow to Mobility-as-a-Service. If there is a permanent, exogenous shift in the volume of travel, this sudden forced reduction in the scale of mobility businesses will make life difficult for many operators. The business case for robo-taxis looks less attractive if there is only demand to fill 40% of the car’s day instead of 80%. The imperative to invest massively in autonomous mobility to fight ills like gridlock, urban congestion, pollution, vehicular accidents, and poor land use is diminished if our highways are emptier, our rush hours less rushed, and our grids less locked.
To be certain, it is a fight still worth fighting. Smart resource use will always pay dividends, and even a marginal change in social habits may be enough to make this effort worthwhile. With applied effort, we may be able to train ourselves out of the habits that drive the use of the automobile as a private mobile storage locker; indeed, more than anything else, the COVID pandemic has shown humanity’s remarkable willingness to change. Nevertheless, from a business standpoint, Mobility-as-a-Service has a few mountains left to climb—it would be a judicious use of corporate effort for the GMs, Teslas, Ubers and Waymos of the world to start thinking about these roadblocks before writing another line of machine-learning code.