Transport planning at a megacity of the future will require more than simply widening streets or building more of them. The suburban mess based on individual transport via automobiles that was inherited from the 1950s will have to give way to efficient, eco-friendly mass transit. It’s difficult to see how the car-dominated cities of the 20th-century can survive the rapid urbanization, higher gasoline prices and ever stricter air pollution regulations that will necessarily be part of the 21st-century urban landscape.
On the one hand, complex technologies and novelties like driverless, electric cars and superfast maglev trains that could run in Egon Musk’s hyperloop are a part of the solution to future urban transport. But such techno marvels are only part of the longer-term solution. Compactness is at least as important.
The more compact a city is, the easier it is to simply walk around in it. So an urban environment consisting of tightly packed, human-scale neighborhoods, connected by clean and affordable transport should play a central role in design of the cities of the future. Such a design is reasonably straightforward when you’re building an entirely new city from scratch. How to retrofit an existing city, especially a spread-out megalopolis like Mexico City or even cities like Paris or London, constitutes an entirely different problem. Such cities are highly complex systems and will call for the deepest analysis system theorists and planners can muster to “compactify” their current urban sprawl.
To get an idea of what might be done with existing cities, in 2016 the US Department of Transportation put together a Smart Cities Challenge inviting cities to compete with proposals for how to revolutionize their transportation infrastructures via technology. The Challenge was won by Columbus, Ohio. Their winning plan was to introduce several autonomous shuttles and a “smart corridor” in which a rapid bus system will carry workers around one of the city’s job centers. Columbus will also develop a number of smart phone apps to provide drivers with real-time traffic, parking and transit options. Finally, the proposal will offer a smart card system that will allow users to pay for everything from bus fares to rides on Uber.
So as the famous Austrian saying goes, the situation for urban transport is desperate—but it’s not serious. There are plenty of good ideas about new transport systems for both existing cities and still-to-be-built ones. And lots of very high tech waiting to manage them. All it will take is will, effort and, of course, money!