Better Integrating Travel Choices into Future Urban Mobility Systems: The Day the Highways Stood Still
This exchange between a scientist and an alien in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still summarizes the dilemma that is facing urban transportation today and that will continue to be a major issue in determining our ability to create a sustainable future. Many engineers and technologists think that they have the answers, while the crux of the matter lies in another popular quote provided by Walt Kelly in his April 1970 Earth Day comic strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy and they is us.”
Digital Innovation and Ridesharing in a Developing Country
The purpose of this chapter is to understand digital innovation in the taxi industrial structure for ridesharing in a developing country. Digital innovations are required in all aspects of an economy including the transportation industry. Drawing on a qualitative interpretive case study methodology, this chapter offers an overview of Uru’s digital innovation for ridesharing in the physical taxi industrial structure in a developing country context of Ghana. The findings show that ridesharing provides riders-drivers with better journey activities, which supersedes taxi services in competition. These are electronic booking, riders’ and drivers’ profiles for security, transparent automatic billing for affordable transportation, and opportunities for drivers to accept a series of riders’ requests at proximity. The chapter provides the implications for these findings for research and practice.
REAPPRAISING METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTATION NEEDS
The purpose of this paper is to describe: (1) The process used to reappraise the transportation needs in Boston, Mass., and the results of that endeavor; (2) the new and revitalized comprehensive, cooperative, and continuing transportation planning process that has been established throughout Massachusetts as a means of bringing the transportation decision-making process closer to the citizens of the Commonwealth; and (3) the relationship of the new transportation planning process to the development of the Action Plan, a recent requirement of the Federal Highway Administration. The experience of the BTPR was utilized in establishing similar open and participatory planning processes throughout the state. This has resulted in a shift in emphasis, from a centralized planning effort in Boston, to a locally based planning effort focusing on the 12 regional planning agencies that encompass nearly all the 351 communities in Massachusetts.