If you’ve ever ridden a busy Toronto streetcar, you’ll know this story:

You’re waiting outside in the cold for a streetcar. When one–actually 4–finally arrive all bunched up together, they’re so packed with people that you’re not actually able to get on. You try one anyways and the driver makes an announcement for everyone to “move back” so that more people can onboard via the front door. After a few minutes of people shuffling to try and get further back, you’re finally able to squeeze on–even if you are virtually sitting on the driver’s lap. You then travel about 2 blocks before the streetcar stops and the same thing repeats. The result is an absolutely infuriating mobility experience that usually makes walking the preferred choice. Who said that downtown already has enough subways?

Over the weekend, I was watching this TED talk with Charlie Rose interviewing Larry Page of Google. One question that Rose asks Page is about why he’s so fascinated with transportation and mobility. That is, why is Google so committed to driverless cars? Page then talks about his experience of waiting for buses when he was a student at the University of Michigan and how he would think about all the inefficiencies in the system. He also talks about how half of the urban fabric of Los Angeles is made up of roads and parking lots and that this is a terrible outcome of the mobility choices made in that city.

I’ve said before that transportation is one of the biggest challenges facing Toronto today. And I truly believe that. But that’s probably the case in most, if not all big cities. Getting people around a city efficiently is such a fundamental need. It stimulates economic growth and it improves quality of life. And those are typically the reasons why people choose to live in cities: to make money and to have a better life. 

Now, I’m a big proponent of public transportation, but I’m also excited by the advances being made outside of mass transit. With driverless cars, electric cars, networks such as Uber and Hailo, and the emergence of the sharing economy, you could easily imagine a bunch of different ways in which mobility could be improved in our cities. Take, for my example, my own driving patterns. I probably drive my car 2, maybe 3 hours per week these days. That translates into a weekly utilization rate of roughly 1.2%! (2 hours / 168 hours week). That’s terribly inefficient. We can do better. And I think we will.

I was browsing my Tumblr feed this morning and I found a link to an interview with Marc Andreessen posted by Fred Wilson.

I liked Marc’s response to a question relating to people’s love of cars and so I decided to post it to Facebook. I then received an email notification from Fred Wilson’s AVC blog titled “The New Freedom." Turns out that he liked the quote as well. With so much love for this quote, I figured it was worth reposting here.

The interviewer started a question to Marc with, “But people love their cars.” This is his response:

"Ask a kid. Take teenagers 20 years ago and ask them would they rather have a car or a computer? And the answer would have been 100% of the time they’d rather have a car, because a car represents freedom, right?

Today, ask kids if they’d rather have a smartphone or a car if they had to pick and 100% would say smartphones. Because smartphones represent freedom. There’s a huge social behavior reorientation that’s already happening. And you can see it through that. And I’m not saying nobody can own cars. If people want to own cars, they can own cars. But there is a new generation coming where freedom is defined by “I can do anything I want, whenever I want. If I want a ride, I get a ride, but I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to make car payments. I don’t have to worry about insurance. I have complete flexibility.” That is freedom too.”

This ties in well with the return to city centers and downtowns. When people live in walkable neighbourhoods, cars can be more of a liability (car payments, insurance, parking, and so on). In fact, I think of them as a liability all around. Banks think of them as an asset, but I like my assets to increase in value.

The other interesting point that Marc makes about cars is that supply and demand are not very well matched using the current model. If you only use your car to drive to and from work, it sits idle 90% of the time. This is where the sharing economy comes into play: How can people better optimize that 90%?

My smartphone certainly doesn’t sit idle 90% of the time.