Resilience through diversification: Learning from Big Tech

Earlier this month, Arity attended MOVE America, the first edition of this conference to happen in the U.S., and the first edition that was virtual.

Speaker:

• Alexa Tang, Product Marketing, Arity

Transcript

Host:
Good afternoon, and welcome to the MOVE America Roundtable, hosted by – resilience through diversification, learning from big tech, hosting this roundtable. We have Alexa Tang and Sandra Phillips. Sandra, Alexa, over to you.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
All right, thanks, Lucia. Thanks so much to everyone for joining us as well. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. Alright now, you should be seeing a quick deck right now, and we are going to move right into our round table. So first, just a quick stop into who we are. My name is Alexa Tang. I’m with Arity, which is a mobility data analytics company. And we’re looking at data in all kinds of forms. We will have driving data, we have all kinds of mobility data through different types of sensors and we’re using that power of telematics and big data analytics to think how we can improve personal mobility across the transportation ecosystem. And Sandra, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

Sandra Phillips:
Yes. Hi, my name is Sandra Phillips. I run a small boutique agency called Move Me that is specialized in shared mobility architecture, essentially the design planning and then the launch of new shared mobility services. You work in three areas. Car sharing is probably where historically most people know us from, but we’ve also worked in micro mobility, particular moped and e-bike projects, and then mobility as a service projects. We globally have supported about 50 projects today. Yeah, and I’m excited to dive into the meet and bones of this conversations.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Great. We’ve also invited a couple panelists to join us live. You’ll see their videos on the screen here. We’ll just let them introduce themselves too. I’m going to go in the order that I see you on my screen right now. So that’ll be Sam, Jeff, and then Ancar. Sam, could you kick it off for us?

Sam Starr:
Sure, thanks. Hi. Excuse me. Hi, I’m Sam Starr. I’m a Vancouver based consultant for sustainable urban freight and cycle Logistics as a system engineer by training. I’ve previously worked for FedEx, Flash Global, U.S. PAC, and others, and with a recent degree in urban systems from UBC, I’ve shifted my purpose towards smart, sustainable cities and solutions and it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Excellent. Thank you for joining. Jeff, could you introduce yourself to the group?

Jeff Perkins:
Sure. Hi, it’s great to be here. My name is Jeff Perkins. I’m the chief marketing officer and head of products at a company called Park Mobile. Hopefully many of you know the Park Mobile app. It’s the number one app for parking in the United States. So we really let you skip the meter kiosk or pay station and pay right on your phone so you could park in cities all over the United States. Plus we have parking at major sports venues, universities really kind anywhere you want to park in the country. Park Mobile has you covered. And obviously I’m very excited to be here for this panel because we are kind of at the epicenter. I think of a lot of the mobility trends going on today as we’re seeing drivers kind of leave the road and drivers come back to the road and the way cities are responding. So it’s great to be here with you.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Great, thanks.

Ansgar Strother:
Jeff. Hi, sorry, little eager here. Hi, I’m Ansgar, one of the co-founders of Movatic. We’re a software platform for micromobility and really sharing in general, we have over a three system launched on the platform, empowers some of the largest brands like Gotcha Mobility and Frog scooters. So excited to share how we’ve seen the shift to more recreational ridership away from kind of transit and downtown during COVID. So excited to be here. Thank you.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Excellent. Yeah, definitely interested everyone’s input into how things are changing and that’s why we’re bringing this group together. So a quick stop just to get a roadmap of what we’ll be doing in this hour together. We really want to make the most of this conversation a collaborative discussion, even a workshop. So we’ve invited this group right here is panelists to start, anyone who is currently in the gallery, we will be opening up once we get to that point. For anyone interested, you’ll just need to raise your hand. I’ll cue you at that point. So just think about it if you’re interested in joining and joining in the live discussion with us. But first we’re going to take a quick stop at some examples and some insights into what’s happening right now with all of this COVID-19. So we’ll look at some trends that have happened with Big Tech and what we can learn from them.
And then we’ll look at changes and trends that we see through Move Me and Arity’s data just to set the stage before we get into the workshop discussion. All right, so getting started. So I wanted to take a minute to look at Big Tech as an example. And here in this chart it’s visualizing all of the biggest acquisitions that these tech giants have made over the last few years. And when I look at this, not only is it amazing to see how many acquisitions have happened over the past several years, but also the breadth of the kinds of industries that these five companies have covered. And what’s really interesting to me, what sticks out is that through these acquisitions, they’ve not only diversified, but they’ve really stuck to their core mission as a company. And they’ve just evolved that into the way that they offer their core products and services.
So if we take Amazon as an…they’re the ones that are represented in the orange on this graph, we see Zappos and Whole Foods stand out as some of their biggest acquisitions. And through their mission statement is really about continually raising the bar of the customer experience. And with these acquisitions, they’re clearly reaching a new kind of consumer and they’re clearly offering a new kind of product and service compared to before, but they’re still staying true to their mission statement. They just have a new way of thinking about who are these customers and what is that customer experience? And so that’s a really standout example to me in addition to the news just today of the FAA approving drone delivery. And that is really fascinating to me to think about how a 30-minute turnaround time for a drone delivery, for something to appear at my door that not only changes my expectations in my experience, but I’m going to start expecting that of all of my deliveries.

What if there were more robots making deliveries? What if it could happen faster and I could have it customized? So this is things are changing all the time and though we here are not these kinds of technology companies, I think what we have to learn here is how as technology driven marketplaces, this is the kind of mindset that we need to have, especially in a world that’s constantly changing. The change is inevitable and adapting is absolutely critical to survive and thrive in these kinds of conditions. And that’s the mindset that I want us to have here. Thinking beyond what we currently consider our industry and thinking how we can really expand what we consider our core today.

And so let’s talk about change. This is what this year has looked like so far in one snapshot to this point and only in one industry of new mobility and transportation. I think we could all share a million personal stories of how COVID-19 has really accelerated change in all of our lives. But this is just a snapshot of what we’re talking about here. So we see these different changes, these headlines, this is change that was already in motion, it’s just happened a lot faster. So we see divestments, we see acquisitions, we see micro mobility having some of its most the highest demand that is seen in a long time. Yet at the beginning of the year there was speculation that it was going to end and this would be the end of it. And with that, we see all kinds of changes in demand, both for an increase and both for decrease.

And all these changes, they can’t happen without responses from regulation. So we see AB 1286 and micro mobility. We’ve seen AB five turn into more and more with Uber and Lyft in California and now the FAA approving drone deliveries. It’s really just a fascinating time if you remove yourself from all of the challenges that we’re also learning how to experience and learning how to navigate. But we know as operators, providers, people in the industry that these are just the headlines. And what really we have to be thoughtful about is amidst all this change, how do our businesses respond? And amidst all this change, how do we continue to deliver the service that we’ve promised and exceed consumer expectations? So Sandra’s actually going to take us through a few highlights of what she is seeing in terms of how these changes are impacting sheer mobility, Sandra.

Sandra Phillips:
Alright, so the next slide please. Thank you. What I want to focus on in the next couple of minutes is three areas. So first is the user. Our behaviors and transportation patterns have actually changed very quickly when normally it takes decades or perhaps a move to a new city for us to change our habits and then how operating teams and regulatory bodies have adjusted to those changes. So if we look at the user, the study that I’m sharing here is work that comes out of the COVID-19 shared mobility task force that I’m sharing. It’s an international body. The study itself, the consumer portion was done in metro Vancouver. And I really want to share six themes that have come out of this. And the themes don’t change whether or not you look at metro Vancouver or Milan or China. It’s the percentages that really change.

The first one we all know is work from home. All of a sudden in metro Vancouver, 80% of the jobs can be done from home. And that’s not during the initial phase. That’s during recovery phase two and three. So what a has done to our transportation patterns is we no longer have peon valleys as much as we used to have in the mornings and the evenings, the pattern has kind of flat or the curve has flattened out a little bit more. I think the second theme that has come out of this is that we’re moving towards more individually owned transportation. I actually chose a picture of bikes rather than cars because bikes and bike trips have really been the winner in winner, if you can call it like that during this pandemic. We have seen an increase of 2% over the last year of bike trips in metro Vancouver.

But we’ve also learned that about 14% of the survey respondents are now looking at buying a car. And that’s quite a low percentage globally, like regions that have been hit harder by the pandemic have closer to 30% of people. All I’m trying to say is we’re moving towards more individually owned transportation because we want to control our destiny. And that really goes into the next theme, which is hygiene. And our health has never factored in to our transportation choices. And Alexa, if you move to the next slide please, it’s all of a sudden the number one reason that people look at when they choose a transportation mode, what that means for the operators, and I am 98% sure that this will stay with us for much longer than the pandemic, is that operators have to think about cleanliness and hygiene a lot more than they used to.
Currently, there’s a lot of experimentation going on in the space from chemical fogging to UV light disinfectant. And I’m personally hopeful that the center of disease control at some point puts out a recommendation of what should be done and maybe shouldn’t be done, but ultimately it has to be addressed. And then the second thing that is really interesting is that the business models and the business rules are starting to shift. So you have car shares that historically offered their cars on a permit or on a per hourly basis that all of a sudden have a program that you can get a car for your own use for a month. Most of these programs were targeted towards essential workers, but still they shifted their business model because obviously there’s a decrease in travel patterns overall. And then the second interesting thing is delivery and personal mobility are starting to merge. I actually picked a picture where a delivery person uses a bike share bike to deliver food and has interesting implications. I don’t think we have figured all of it out, particularly on the insurance side. I don’t know how that’s going to work, but there is a shift and it’ll stay. I’m convinced of that as well. And then the last two themes are on the regulatory side.

So people, this is again data from Metro Vancouver. They still would like to see support for public transit, but number two and number three are what I find really is interesting. Number two is they want to see more infrastructure dedicated to walking and biking. And I think that’s where we’ve seen most work on the city side. They have taken away lanes from cars and dedicated them to micro mobility. They’ve taken away parking and they dedicated it to pedestrians and restaurants so they can ensure physical distancing better. And then the third point is shared mobility. People want to see more support of these more nimble forms. And again, it’s a way of controlling your own destiny. You don’t have to worry so much about physical distancing as you do in public transit. You still have to worry about cleanliness perhaps, but they want to see more of that supported.
And I think that the last theme that I find really interesting is that regulators all of a sudden are able to implement these changes much quicker. Something that has historically took years to consult and figure out where to put the bike line in all of a sudden it was possible to remove a lane within weeks. And again, I think that’s maybe we won’t stay on that accelerated track as much, but I do think there’s a change in how regulation and infrastructure works when there’s a change in consumer behavior that we’ll see going forward. And so with that, those six themes, I’ll pass you back to Alexa for the next portion.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Mute. Okay, sorry about that. Okay, thanks, Sandra. Great. So Sandra covered some themes that are happening in terms of how things are shifting. It’s like a lot is the same, but the amount of focus and the amount of tension that certain areas get has really changed and readjusted. So with Arity, what we’re looking at is primarily driving data and we have more than 23 million [as of 2020] connections across the U.S. through mobile phones and sensors. And so what we wanted to do in the wake of COVID is really track how driving is changing. Of course, mileage is down, trips are down as people move around less, there’s less businesses open. But we wanted to understand how personal trips that means, trips that are happening for commutes or for leisure, any sort of personal reason versus gig trips. And those are the trips that are happening when people are driving for work.

So that in our case would be ride share and delivery. And we look at that based on the patterns that people are moving. They’re very distinctly different if someone is going on a commute or going on a longer trip compared to if they’re making more stops for deliveries or more stops to pick up passengers. So that’s how we’re analyzing this. And what’s what you see here is that at the start of March, which is when the U.S. got their stay at home orders, of course driving dropped drastically, but personal driving dropped 50%, whereas the gift trips, those only dropped by 30% in comparison. So what we can infer is the different motivations and how those play into the way that people were moving or were not moving. Presumably the people who are continuing to make those gig trips relied more on that source of income as they were making those trips, they were considering them more essential to their lives and to their work.

So if we take that a step farther, then we look at the kinds of drivers that were making these gig trips. And so what we see here is that this separates the drivers based on the number of gig trips they were making for different platforms based on how many trips they were making per week. So those that were making 40 plus trips per week, those were considering the full-time drivers. And you’ll see that their drop was much less drastic compared to the part-time drivers in blue and orange. The ones who were driving below 40 trips a week, they had a much more drastic drop where they were making 35% fewer trips for gig platforms compared to before those stay-at-home orders. There’s a lot of reasons and a lot of factors that play into this. Of course there’s the employment rates and unemployment rates and the idea that people are going to need additional sources of income.

There’s also the idea that rideshare demand has started increasing more as people are starting to get back into different parts of their lives. Again, the increased surge in delivery demand, that’s definitely changed how people are driving, especially for the gig economy. And then all of this is wrapped up in a place where the economy’s under duress in general. So what is going to happen in the way that people move? What is the way, what’s going to happen with the way people choose jobs and how they earn money? And then to Sandra’s point, how people are concerned with hygiene and health more than ever, that’s also going to dictate how they use both rideshare and delivery services. So that all plays into how the data, the data definitely reflects how that all plays out.

So all of this is to say that transportation is definitely at a turning point. We’re seeing change that we’ve never seen before. Everyone is learning how to manage and navigate it all. And what we want to talk about and use the rest of our time today is how can we think about collectively adapting and designing for resilience and how can we combine what we know and our forces to really, really push that change? So that’s what we’re going to do in the next portion of our discussion in the remainder of the round table, is to have a collaborative workshop kind of set up. And at this point if anyone is interested in, if anyone is interested to join the discussion to be one of our panelists, you can raise your hand and Lucia our organizer, will add you onto the panelist.

Okay, so this is a board called Mural and this will be our online collaboration tool. And we’re going to use this mainly to visualize our discussion. I have a friend and colleague named Gina, she’ll be helping us to transcribe the kinds of conversation we have and the ideas we come up with in this portion. And so this way we’ll have a visual of our conversation and at the end of this session we’ll be able to share this out as a PDF with everyone who’s joined the discussion. I’ll go over what we’re going to do in a second, but before I do that, any questions or comments or questions on how to join as a panelist from anyone, feel free to use that chat function.
Okay, sounds good. All right, so we left off with the conversation in terms of designing for resilience. So this portion is going to help us explore what does design resilience really mean. So here we’re going to use the prompt, what might our businesses look like in 2050, just as a way to help us think forward, think in the future some, what do our businesses need, what does our industry need for the next 10, 20, 30 years? And in this session we really want to identify scenarios that will make our businesses more resilient and then get to the point where we can look at those scenarios and then identify the data that we’d need to start tracking now so that we can be successful in 2050.

So we’re going to use this format here, which is called a creative matrix. And all it is, it’s really a grid and it’s just helping us think through the different kinds of industries we’re talking about in this case, car share, ride share, micro mobility, delivery on demand, and last mile logistics. And then down the side we have different categories of solutions that can help these industries think forward, think how to innovate and think how to evolve. So we have diversification, we have cost reductions and we have collaboration, and then we have wildcard, which just means anything beyond these categories that are specifically listed here. Anything that might also be an idea. And as we’re going through this, you might see some different ideas pop up or piggyback off of each other to create idea babies. And we’ll post those up on the board as well.

A quick example before I pause for questions and open up. So I posted a couple of things here with Sandra just as an example. So delivery on demand and diversification. And this is an example of what’s already happening. It’s not a new idea, which is also okay, but in that case, delivery on demand is diversifying pretty quickly. We see them adding more merchants onto their platforms, especially if we think food delivery, we see grocers and we see convenience stores adding on to the types of merchants that they have, which expands the kinds of goods that they can offer their customers. So that’s just a quick example of how this works. Any questions before we start? Okay. So then panelists, I think it would probably be helpful if you just unmute yourself so that you can freely chime in at any time. And for anyone who has joined us but is not currently a panelist, if you would like to join us after we get some of the conversation started and you see how this is going, feel free to raise your hand or just type into the chat and we’ll see if we can add you in. Sound good?
Okay, so we are now going to open up the conversation. Gina, if you could help me set the timer for let’s say 15 minutes and we’ll just time block this so that we make sure that we get to the discussion around data too. And then Gina, I’m going to follow you so we can follow you along as you help us visualize what we’re talking about.

Alright, so we covered a lot of things. We covered changes from the user perspective, operations regulations, so I encourage you to think along those lines along with some of the questions we were talking about earlier today around what kinds of changes are you already dealing with, what kinds of changes are you preparing for, especially as it relates to public health and hygiene.

Sandra Phillips:
Yeah, going to say we started talking about this earlier, so maybe not to put you on a spot, but maybe you…

Ansgar Strother:
Okay, let’s go. So I think one of the things we noticed, right when COVID hit a lot of operators initially jumping back a step, we provide the software so we’re not directly operating, but we obviously see and are working with all of the different operators. So initially we saw a big hit in people, oh my gosh, lockdown, let’s stay inside. But as that shifted, people did want to get outside and do something that was fun. Everyone has, I think at this point some level of cabin fever and what’s more fun than jumping on a bike, jumping on a scooter or doing something for recreation. And I think one of the really interesting trends that sometimes isn’t talked enough about within the micro mobility space or it’s called the mobility space, is how sharing rental personal ownership, they’re really all a very similar thing. But what we’re talking about is how as a cost of technology comes down, you’re able to enter into these different markets.

And when you have assets everywhere, suddenly you hit a price point where you can start moving into on demand delivery a lot more. You can service trips that have a lower price point, lower density. So long way of saying basically that while if you wanted to continue to operate and offer bikes at a hotel that focused on all state tourists, you were in a lot of trouble. But if you were able to then reposition your fleet to focus on local residents who wanted to get out of their houses and use the technology you had developed, then you had actually a pretty big opportunity because people still had revenue and wanted to do something.

Sandra Phillips:
So are you saying, I’m going to paraphrase, but what I’m hearing is essentially that on the rental car or a rental bike, guys are all of a sudden moving into the shared touchless on demand business and you’re seeing that on the micro mobility side and I will jump in and say we’ll see exactly the same thing on the car sharing side. They all of a sudden want to play in that space. So okay, I see Gina just typed it up. There we go.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Thank you, Gina.

Jeff Perkins:
I’ll jump in and go ahead. Okay, I’ll add, we’ve done a lot of research on impacts of COVID on behavior of our audience and our audience or generally people or the parking in metro areas, but they’re also heavy users of, or they were heavy users of rideshare and transit in many cases. And what they’ve told us in our research study is that they’re basically shifting only to personal automobile and away from public transit and away from ride sharing and I should say ride hailing. So Uber and Lyft and definitely away from scooters and other micro mobility sources. So I think it’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out now that more people are going back to work back to urban areas to see if that is going to be the case. But what we see is that they want everything to be personal to them so they can control it.

So even if they’re a local resident, they’re not as interested in maybe renting a bike as they are owning a bike. And I don’t know if you guys have tried to buy a bike recently, it’s almost impossible all the bike stores are sold out unless you want to buy a souped up $3,000 bike. So what it really comes down to in the short term, I think a lot of these companies are going to be really in trouble because I knew Uber’s had mass layoffs, Lyft’s had a lot of layoffs, even the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) are having layoffs, but there’s companies are going to be in trouble as people are shifting. They want the vehicles to be very much their vehicle that they control and they feel safe in. And I think that idea of hygiene or cleanliness that you talked about is super relevant because we see it in our business as soon as COVID happened, every city out there that doesn’t have a mobile app and that was forcing people to use a pay meter, they called us and we’ve had 20 cities we’ve opened in the last two months just because these cities realize they need contactless.

So I think the real trend is going to be personal and contactless and the businesses that kind of go in that direction or figure out, even if it is a car sharing business, it’s got to be super clean, super contactless for it to work in this environment.

Sandra Phillips:
Jeff, can I pick up on something? So the contactless is one thing and I don’t know that that fits anywhere in, maybe it’s the wildcard that we put it in, but I do want to pick up on the fact that people seem to go more towards individualistic and the other trend that we’re seeing, which is subscription, the idea of subscription services have been around before the pandemic and all of a sudden, at least on the micro mobility side, it seems like they’re gaining a lot more traction. Do you think it’s maybe the shared space just moves into, it’s almost like a longer term. As I say, it’s a subscription, it’s my vehicle, but I still don’t own it, so I still don’t have to worry about the maintenance and if it breaks down, is that something you see as well or

Jeff Perkins:
I mean other people can comment. We’ve seen some of those businesses hurting and I’m in Atlanta, we have a business called Clutch here in Atlanta. Once COVID happened, I mean I think it’s going to come back eventually. The question is which of these companies are going to be able to weather the storm? I think you will see some rollups as companies try to band together to because, and over time I do believe a lot of these services will come back, but I think it’s going to take a while and I think in the meantime you’re just going to see, it’s hard to find it for dealerships today for example, it’s hard for dealerships to find used cars. There’s just not enough used cars out there because everyone’s grabbing them. Everyone wants to buy cars, they want to be in personal vehicles. So I think it is incumbent on, I think Uber’s done a good job of it. I think the car sharing services are doing a good job communicating, Hey, in the rental car companies, here’s our policy around cleanliness. Here are the things we’re doing to mitigate the transmission of the virus. But at the same time, I think people are going to be slow to come back to them. Eventually they will, but I think it’s going to be a long road back until we are at a pre COVID levels with ride sharing, ride hailing and micro mobility solutions.

Sam Starr:
I’d like to build on that actually as well. I mean Sandra, you mentioned how we’re seeing more, excuse me, of the subscription model increase. We’re also seeing car companies manufacturers come out with subscription and trying to push them further than they were not just luxury car companies. But at the same time we’re also starting to see e-bike and e cargo bike subscription models as well and these kinds of new mobility things. And this sort of almost in some ways shared is I think also the beginning of what we hope to see with regards to shared spaces. And that’s where I wanted to shift the conversation to a bit too, because sharing space, for example, Jeff and the parking and now with fewer vehicles out there on the road necessarily coming into the downtown, being able to re-leverage that space for urban hubs, whether those be a small shipping container in the parking space, something that UPS, for example, is doing in Dublin and being able to better position cargo bikes and more sustainable logistics. I mean there’s a lot of opportunity in this as well that can ultimately help lower the price of doing this final mile and also better facilitate delivery on demand when you start putting these micro warehouses on the roads as well.

Sandra Phillips:
So just to help put that somewhere that thought about the hubs, and it sounds to me like there’s collaboration between let’s say the parking providers or the curb space and the delivery side of things that you haven’t seen before. Is that what I’m hearing you say?

Sam Starr:
Well, the idea of collaborating under the same roof, like getting a FedEx, UPS, and Amazon to all get under the same roof and share a space is not as easy a task as it may sound. And the concept of getting towards what’s known as the physical internet that ultimately getting to that level of collaboration where we’re able to really optimize deliveries no matter who’s moving them is definitely more decades away unfortunately. But that being said, this is the opportunity I think we’re positioned with COVID and especially with the panel we have here as well, to also discuss about how we can reallocate these spaces and potentially share these spaces, whether they be parking spaces or for on-demand needs for final mile or there’s examples that we’re seeing today where parking companies are reallocating their space to run cargo bikes out of and turn that into a mini hub that we’re seeing across North America today. We’re also seeing cities look at reallocating buildings to turn them into mini hubs as well. Montreal is a fantastic example there. So I think that trend, we’re going to ideally see more of that and we’ll definitely change how we think about micro mobility and reallocation of space as well as collaboration.

Ansgar Strother:
And I just want to push back a little bit on that. Micro mobility is down overall. I think you really have to look at individual companies and how they’re positioning themselves to go after it because some companies are up double, triple volume on some companies that we work with. So I think it’s very much by market and how you approach your cleanliness because if you’re talking about a scooter or a bike, you have two points of contact that you’re on. So: 1. The user can wipe that down, 2. Staff can wipe that down as well. And if that’s described properly, it’s really nothing safer that you could be doing at a time.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Yeah. Sam, what you were saying about how can shared spaces be flexible and dynamic, I’d love to probe into that idea a little bit more, especially as we think about basically all of these industries are blending, Ansgar. You mentioned hospitality or hotels and those kinds of places are mostly unused right now or heavily underutilized compared to certain residences. What are different ways that we can think of? How do these spaces become dynamic? What kind of signals would we need to send to, would Park mobile need to pick up from how Nova’s clients their users are really getting around and the sensors and what they’re picking up? What could we generate there?

Sam Starr:
I guess I’ll go first. I mean I think it’s a combination of technology as well as a will to a will to collaborate, so to speak. So in what I see with Park Mobile is there could be a great opportunity to work with freight provider, with freight delivery companies or local courier companies to leverage those unutilized spaces as little depots as they try as these companies look to roll out lower cost methods of urban delivery for example. That’s just one. And I think when we think about the collaboration use of these underutilized spaces, what a great opportunity to put better micro mobility options, charging center underutilized. We don’t have enough charging infrastructure for micro mobility out there necessarily today. Whether they be your EV or they be your e-bike…

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Yeah, those are definitely training out.

Sam Starr:
So all of these things help better push for really, really pushed these new mobility solutions into the market further and really having that ecosystem is absolutely necessary for making the e-bike just as well utilized as cars are so to speak these days. So having that infrastructure there. Yeah, go ahead, Jeff. Yeah.

Jeff Perkins:
It’s super interesting. Just the different six months makes, six months ago every conversation I was having with our city clients was around urban congestion, curb management, and how do we set up these scooter hubs and mobility hubs and that’s all they were talking about. How do we connect transit with parking more effectively? And all of those conversations have gone away basically because the impact of COVID has just been, all the initiatives just take a lot of revenue for the company to do and when cities are, every city now is really getting crushed on revenue because things like parking power way down and if parking’s down, the revenue’s not coming in, if offices are closing, small business are closing tax dollars not coming in. So a lot of these big dream projects I do believe will happen. I think the macro trends of people moving into urban centers, cities growing cities becoming more congested and the livability being a major concern, those are still going to come back, but I think it’s going to take a little bit longer now because a lot of the initiatives that we saw where we were trying to bring together things like pick up drop off zones in the park mobile app so people know if they’re driving Uber where to go to drop someone off so they’re not creating congestion.

A lot of those bigger initiatives, they’ve just been paused, but they will come back. I mean, I think to your point, Sam, you’re going to see people who are delivery people going to specific loading zones and people driving to basically scooter hubs and parking around scooter hubs. I mean, that’s all going to be something that’s going to be very important for cities over time once we get back to some kind of normalcy when it comes to people coming back into city and really commuters. I think that’s the big thing. Once commuters come back and start creating more congestion, then these issues are going to come to the forefront again.

Ansgar Strother:
I think one thing I’ll add to that is, oh, sorry…

Alexa Tang, Arity:
I was just adding on commentary. I think I agree it’ll be the old issues, but coming back with layers of these new challenges that we live with, sorry, Ansgar.

Ansgar Strother:
Jeff, I really liked one of the things you said earlier about the shift to contactless. I think as you get more and more app-based technology into e-bike, into bike parking infrastructure as well, there will be an opportunity to sort of have some of these hubs and other things naturally happen as well that I know a lot of people have talked about the data sharing, but there’s still a lot of data sources that aren’t sharing data yet. And I think COVID is accelerating that trend, which will allow us to get to the integrated city of the future that we’ve been talking about now for a decade.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Perfect.

Sam Starr:
Yeah, I agree with that.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Yeah, that’s actually a really great segue into the last little bit that we’re going to talk about. Really great discussion. Thank you all for your input. But in terms of sharing data in the integrated city and what does that look like in this last portion, what I’d like to do is based on the discussion and the ideas that we shared while we were chatting, I want to take a look at how data would reflect to these kinds of changes. So this is an example here based on something that I seeded into the board, but if we’re talking about increasing local pickup hubs and decentralizing warehouses, of course that meets supply chain and distribution changes, but what data would really reflect how the network is really changing? So of course traffic changes the hours and the usage there, maybe the vehicle types. So that’s the kind of succession in terms of the conversation that we’ll have.
And I’m actually going to pick on Sam’s idea. I thought it would be a great one to explore. It’s the one about using underutilized spaces as pickup hubs, logistics hubs, maybe even more hubs beyond that. Let’s explore that one. Thanks Gina. Let’s explore that one a little bit. Let’s talk about if we were to do implement this kind of scenario, use underutilized spaces for charging stations, we also mentioned logistics hubs. So this idea of multipurpose hubs, what would have to change around it for this to happen? That’s the question. We’ll do a quick, rapid fire to collect those ideas.

Sam Starr:
I think we definitely need to start with the data. Obviously data-driven approach is in a very important way to ensure that when we engineer these solutions, we do so properly. I think collaboration is absolutely critical in all this. I know I’ve used that word quite a bit so far, but I absolutely think that truly the collaboration between municipalities, private and public industry, industry and all that is absolutely critical to making these solutions work. Because I’ve seen examples, at least from the urban freight side where if the city does not really take the initiative, then nothing really unfortunately happens.

And no matter how much they want to be the most sustainable green city, we still need to see that action. And those public private partnerships really can go a long way. And also so the data, the collaboration, but the infrastructure, Sandra, at the beginning of the presentation really highlighted how we are seeing a bunch of cities that have really taken this initiative where they would never have put necessarily a bike lane before or it was in their plans 10 years from now, they’ve put it in today, we’re seeing Paris with a 15 minute city. That infrastructure and building a connected network makes shifting your mode that much more attractive. And as a cyclist here in Vancouver, I definitely love the fact that I can get pretty much around metro Vancouver. Yes, it’s not completely safe in everywhere I go, but at least it’s somewhat accessible. Having that be more connected and more all ages, all abilities, opens all users as well as other businesses as well into this space. And I think that’s absolutely necessary that we start thinking on different levels of different types of infrastructure that we need in order to make these very attractive mobility options.

Sandra Phillips:
I want to jump off on something that you said at the end, and it’s been burning on my tongue the entire time. I think the one thing with these hubs that we, which has been a challenge ever since I work in the space, is the whole equity topic and how do you find data points to measure that? So when you deploy infrastructure, these hubs, these delivery hubs, you don’t just deploy them in the wealthiest white best educated neighborhoods, but you will actually distribute your network based on demand. And now how do you get that? That’s a very good question. Obviously this is where Alexa, you guys probably have a lot of data points from just mobility and trip patterns, but I do think on the shared mobility side, there has been push towards MDS (Mobility Data Specification) standards. You have the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) feeds, which is the public transit feed. You have those data feeds already implemented. I’m not familiar enough with the delivery side, but my gut is telling me that we don’t have exactly a standard that we can pull all the data feeds. And I think that would be really helpful because now you can overlay the two and hopefully create an equitable network of these hubs.

Sam Starr:
Yeah, I I know that’s definitely a challenge here in North America for sure. I’ve seen some movement in Europe through the CIVITAS project and others where they are working with private as well as public delivery firms like the Royal Mail, et cetera, to gather information on deliveries and ultimately be able to work backwards. I would love to see that here. Having worked for some large companies like FedEx and others, I know that that data sharing is not really currently top of mind. It doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be some openness as we get out of COVID 19 or move forward with this, but it would definitely help in that type of collaboration. So, yes, if there is somebody out there that does have this information, I would love to know more about of those private companies coming forward and sharing that type of data.

Sandra Phillips:
And I need a regulatory push. It’s like it needed on the shared mobility side, right? You are not allowed to operate your kick scooter operations unless you’re part of the or unless you share your data in the m d s feed. So maybe there needs to be a regulatory push. I don’t know.

Sam Starr:
Yeah, I was just going to say, and I know the municipalities that when these pilots are being run for cargo cycles, for example, that municipalities are requesting that that information get shared back as part of the program. So there is some data out there. I mean, Montreal has some really wonderful data from their Collibra project that was great to see how many trucks they’re able to take off the road on a weekday and how many kilograms of CO2 they’ve saved over time and the efficiency improvements, et cetera. That’s all fantastic information though, being able to get these individual large firms, the UPS, FedEx, Amazons to go share some of that, I think is a little bit harder to do unless they are part of those city projects and those are isolated cases. But yes, I agree. So regulatory framework would definitely benefit.

Jeff Perkins:
Yeah, I’ll add to that. I think the city to keep an eye on, at least in the United States is the city of Columbus, Ohio. Columbus got a smart city grant about two years ago and we’re involved in this program, it’s called Smart Columbus, but basically they’re looking at every aspect of mobility in the city and they have a lot of money to fund initiatives to innovate it. And so we’re working on the parking side, there’s a transit initiative, there’s micro mobility initiatives, and then there’s initiatives to bring it all together. And I think that’s an example of what I would say is a laboratory that a lot of other cities are going to look to say, how do they do that? And then how do we implement that here? Because the thing I’ve learned working with municipalities is many of them don’t want to be first, especially if it’s their own taxpayer dollars. But if they get funded to be a laboratory for these really innovative, some of these cities will go first and then once they have a good proof of concept, you’re going to see every other city basically do what they did, follow the leader in a way. And so I think Columbus is probably among our clients, one of the best examples to keep an eye on as they start to roll out a lot of their smart mobility initiatives in the coming months.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
With the regulations. I do agree and see that so much of what happens and what data is shared is regulation driven. I would love it as this panel is more on the operator side. I would love it if there were a way to lead with the data and say, Hey, we are already improving equity by this much, and hey, we are already increasing access to jobs in these ways. And Sandra, you were saying that we probably have data to speak to that. And I think what’s unfortunate is that right now the data speaks to how there’s clearly inequity in transportation and where people move more from one side of the city to the other, but not the other way around. So how do we shift that as we’re planning our services from the operator perspective, and then how do we track the right data to show that those changes are actually happening and we’ve implemented the right thing. I couldn’t help Sam when you were talking about everyone’s just trying to see what happens. There’s the thing that stands out, national Geographic. It’s like when all the penguins are at the ledge and they’re just pushing each other to see if the first penguin drops off, it’s okay. But if we could flip that and just have a penguin be in the water, be like, yeah, it’s okay.

I’m here. It’s good. That’s going to be our next problem statement for the next workshop. How might we be more like a penguin? Now that I’ve got us really focused. Ansgar? Sorry, did I see you saying something or is it just…

Ansgar Strother:
I was just going to say, I think there are also a lot of positive developments too, because we’re still in the early innings. A lot of this stuff. I mean, if you think of how much cheaper smartphones continue to get, you can now buy a smartphone for $40 that actually works. That’s now making it far more accessible to bring some of those mapping technologies with payment into people’s pockets. So we’re not there yet and we have to keep working. But I think it also is somewhat not just a collaboration effort, but just continuing to drive the tech forward, which the industry is definitely doing.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Yeah. Thank you.

Okay, thanks. I think this is a really good list here. Let’s just take a quick look at what we generated so far. We’re talking about multipurpose hubs and enabling that by using underutilized spaces for things like charging stations with e-bikes, really on the up and up. We recognize that there’s going to require, it’ll require collaboration between municipalities, more P3 partnerships, and we really want a way to incite action with the city and influence them to understand where this need comes from. With that. We know now that infrastructure changes can happen a lot faster than they have typically historically. And there’s a lot to be explore here in terms of how would multi-purpose hubs change traffic? How would multi-purpose hubs change the type of user that’s on the road? And what are their needs? How does safety rank for them? How does speed rank for them?
What kinds of infrastructure do we need to implement there? And then how do we report back that this is happening? What’s the kind of data we need to send in? How do we standardize that? How can we as operators lead on standardizing or do we be more reactive and wait for regulations to dictate what standardized data looks like? But overall, we agree that the core of what we need to do is share more data in order to get to the integrated city ideal in that vision. And we know that there are references in other places, in other parts of the world if you’re North America like me, and we can look at not only the programs, but the regulatory framework there. Along with some other great examples in the us, Columbus, and all of this is, I think what’s great about the panelists here is that we have a good representation of different aspects of mobility with micro mobility, the overall urban transport and urban planning spaces where we need to stop so that we can actually go and go about a city or go about any place and do the things that brought us there.

It’s all just an integrated network as we know, and it’s just really a puzzle that we have to keep breaking down. So thank you again for all of your comments. What we’ll do after this is we’ll wrap up some of the key themes that emerged during this session, and we’ll share it out with everyone who joined the panelists and the attendees. So let’s see. We only have a couple minutes left and I’m going to put the panelists on the spot, and let’s have each of you just share one thing that you would like to see with, we’ll take today’s news, drone deliveries. How would drone deliveries work into the model of what you are working on right now? Ansgar, I choose you, you’re like, I’m never going to be a panel again.

Ansgar Strother:
Well, I’ll first say thank you for having me on the panel. And then I think I would work into, our scheme is supporting, we actually have a couple operators that are offering memberships to delivery personnel for a fixed monthly fee. They can jump on a shared asset scooter or bike to do that delivery.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Awesome. Jeff?

Jeff Perkins:
I’m really not a fan of drones flying around. I feel like I’m tall, so I feel like one’s going to just hit me in the head at some point. But no, I mean, I do think we are in such a infant stage when it comes to all these micro mobility solutions. It’s all super fragmented. One thing that we’re trying to do is trying to connect more of these services together, and that’s the hope. So you take the company that’s delivering drones, we would like that whoever’s the driver for that company to have a designated spot and he could potentially find that spot in our app and then pay to park there in our app. So then the city makes money as that person’s packaging up the drones and getting them ready for flight. So I think over time you’re going to see winners emerge in the micro mobility space, and then you’re going to see the winners start to really start to integrate much more tightly together. And I think over time, you’re going to have a very consolidated, I don’t know what app it’s going to be. It might be ours, it might be Waze, it might be something else, but you’re going to have kind of one app where you can do a lot of different mobility services within one experience.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. All right, Sam, you’re up.

Sam Starr:
Well, I think similarly to Jeff, I mean, I think drones do have their space and their place in micro mobility and in the supply chain. One of the things that drones don’t necessarily solve is really the last steps. They might get you to the last mile, but they don’t solve the less steps, which makes them a better candidate for things like rural deliveries and medicine and urgent deliveries that are outside of city centers and even outside of metro Vancouver, for example, or the rural areas here in metro Vancouver, for example. And that’s where really I see them fitting into the whole supply chain and being a solution, especially in places where these delivery firms see really high costs of doing that last mile and are sending trucks several kilometers, one way to do a delivery, which is very, very, very expensive. So that is definitely where they could fit in. Definitely not in city environments for the same reasons Jeff highlighted and yeah.

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay. We’re right at time, so I’m going to go ahead and wrap up here. Thank you again for joining, sharing your ideas. I know this certainly was incredibly helpful for me to get different perspectives across the industry, got some really good ideas, and see where we overlap and despite all of our different companies and different focuses. So thank you. Our emails are here on the screen. If you’d like to email us or connect with us on the app, please reach out. We’d love to chat more. So thanks, everyone. Enjoy your day.

Speaker 9:
Bye

Alexa Tang, Arity:
Bye-bye.