One of the things that many city planners, transportation experts, and municipalities are trying to figure out is how to successfully shift people away from driving towards alternative modes of transportation, such as biking and transit. Now, this is no easy task. There are a myriad of factors that influence a person’s decision to drive or not drive–or if they should even own a car in the first place. Though, land use and density are, in my opinion, probably the biggest.

But of all the solutions thrown around, mobile apps are typically not within the playbook. However a recent New York Times article is making the argument that it should be, because car-sharing services and apps like Uber seem to be indeed having an affect on people’s decision to own a car. And that’s because in some cities it’s actually cheaper to use Uber every day (than to own a car) and because taxi use has been shown to correlate with other (non-driving) forms of mobility.

Paradoxically, some experts say, the increased use of ride-sharing services could also spawn renewed interest in and funding for public transportation, because people generally use taxis in conjunction with many other forms of transportation.

In other words, if Uber and its ride-sharing competitors succeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see many small and midsize cities become transportation nirvanas on the order of Manhattan — places where forgoing car ownership isn’t just an outré lifestyle choice, but the preferred way to live.

And to be honest, I don’t think this is all that far stretched. More and more I find myself wondering why I even own a car. It’s not appreciating sitting downstairs in my garage and, given the frequency in which I use it, I would definitely be better off financially if I simply used an app like Uber or Hailo more often. About the only thing those apps aren’t great for are trips to Home Depot and snowboard trips to the mountain. 

I’m a big believer in public transportation. I generally believe that the only way to build a big, efficient, and sustainable city is on the backbone of a good transit system. But at the same time, I’m open to fresh ideas. And I’m concerned with the inability of most cities to actually build transit in a way that meaningfully responds to demand.

So what are the alternatives?

The first thought that comes to mind is the delivery system itself. Some cities, such as Hong Kong, have successfully combined transit delivery with real estate development as a way to improve the economics behind building transit. And I think that makes a lot of sense.

But my other thought is that maybe the solution to urban mobility is something completely new. Maybe Google is on to something with their driverless cars. Is that the future? Many would disagree.

We’ve established that cars don’t work all that well for getting people around in big congested cities. So what difference would it make whether or not the cars have a driver or not? Well, I was thinking about this last night and there are some meaningful differences.

A network of driverless cars would give us perfect information about all to the cars on the road. Similar to to how Google’s Waze navigation app feeds off user input (both active and passive), we’d know the exact number of cars on the road and the precise point in which additional cars would cause a drop in efficiency (i.e. a reduction in vehicle speeds).

At the same time, it could enable a powerful sharing economy. In a recent study done by MIT’s Senseable City Lab, it was found that roughly 80% of New York cab rides could be shared. That is, 80% of the time there’s somebody else who’s also traveling from roughly the same point A to the same point B.

So here’s what I’m thinking.

You use Google’s driverless car technology and the perfect information you get from the networked vehicles to create a fluid and ever-evolving transit network. What I’m imagining is that the driverless vehicles don’t operate based on a model of individual mobility; they instead operate on a principle of batched mobility.

Let’s say for example that there are critical mass of people who want to leave Liberty Village between 8:00am - 8:30am to travel to the Financial District. What they would do is enter this itinerary and then a “station” would get formed somewhere nearby. Users would get notified of the station’s location, which would be determined based on proximity to the highest concentration of “riders.”

The driverless cars would then get notified and would begin assembling the appropriate number of vehicles at the selected station location. As is the case with conventional forms of public transportation, most people would need to walk to the station. But never that far.

In essence, it would function as a cross between private and public transportation. You would get the economies of scale generated by public transit, with some of the individual conveniences of private transportation.

How does that sound?

This past Sunday night I was out for a bike ride with a few friends all around downtown Toronto. According to Strava, we did almost 22 km. Click here to see our route. During the ride, one of my friends said something to me that stood out. He said that when he’s on a bike he wants all cars off the road; but when he’s in a car, he wants all bikes off the road.

Now, this may seem like a fairly banal statement, but I think it demonstrates a number of things about people and the way we interact with cities. First, we’re all probably pretty selfish. We want what we want at a specific moment in time and we easily forget what it’s like to be on the other side of a situation.

Second, I think it reinforces what I wrote a month ago in a post called: Every street can’t be everything to everyone. If we want to improve the user experience for a variety of different use cases (driving, biking, walking and so on), we should decide when and where we’re going to optimize for each. 

The reason my friend said what he said was because we were riding on a road with no bike lanes. We were swerving in and around cars. And when the street is shared like this it naturally becomes a competition of who can be the most aggressive and dominate the road–bikes or cars. But as exciting as that might be, it’s probably not an ideal way to build our cities.