Urban expert John Rossant and business journalist Stephen Baker look
beyond the false promises of the past to examine the real future of
transportation and the repercussions for the world's cities, the global
economy, the environment, and our individual lives.
Human mobility, dominated for a century by cars and trucks, is facing a
dramatic transformation. Over the next decade, new networked devices,
from electric bikes to fleets of autonomous cars, will change the way we
move. They will also disrupt major industries, from energy to cars, give
birth to new mobility giants, and lead to a redesign of our cities. For
Rossant and Baker, this represents the advance of the Information
Revolution into the physical world. This will raise troubling questions
about surveillance, privacy, the dangers from hackers and the loss of
jobs. But it also promises startling efficiencies, which could turn our
cities green and, perhaps, save our planet.
In an engaging, deeply reported book, the authors travel to mobility
hotspots, from Helsinki to Shanghai, to scout out this future. And they
visit the companies putting it together. One, Divergent3d, is devising a
system to manufacture cars with robots and 3D printers. PonyAI, a
Chinese-Silicon Valley startup, builds autonomous software that
perceives potholes, oncoming trucks, and wayward pedestrians, and guides
the vehicle around them. Voom, an Airbus subsidiary, is racing with
dozens of others to operate fleets of air taxis that fly by themselves.
Hop, Skip, Go is about us: billions of people on the move. Underlying
each stage of mobility, from foot to horse to cars and jets, are the
mathematics of three fundamental variables: time, space and money. We
measure each trip we take, whether to Kuala Lumpur or the corner
drugstore. As the authors make clear, the coming mobility revolution
will be no different. As they unveil the future, the authors explore how
these changes might revamp our conception of global geography, the hours
in our days, and where in the world we might be able to go.
