Last week, Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers published her annual internet trends report. You can find it here, if for whatever reason it is not showing up below. Also, here is last year’s Internet Trends 2017 presentation in case you’re curious.
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Internet Trends Report 2018 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
One slide that stood out for me is the one below. It shows the global demand for transportation trips booked through smartphone apps. The numbers include on-demand taxis, private for-hire vehicles, as well as on-demand motorbikes and bicycles.
China, through a combination of cars and bicycles, makes up 68% of the global share. It looks to be over 5 billion completed trips in Q1 2018. A staggering number. At the same time, look at how much of that is a result of growth in the number of bicycle trips.
The Knight Foundation has just announced $1 million in support to the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a multi-year, multi-city, and applied research effort that they are calling the Future of the American City. The program will start in Miami and Miami Beach, but the plan is to expand to Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
As part of this initiative, the GSD will embed faculty and urban researchers into the local community, as well as organize three design studios that will build on each other every year. In the case of Miami and Miami Beach, the 3 themes that will be explored are urban mobility, affordability, and climate change. As you know, these two cities are center ice for the problem of sea level rise.
This sounds very similar to a design studio that I took at Penn, which was centered around water and housing issues in Bangladesh. It was a multi-year research studio (5 years in this case) and we visited and got paired up with locals in Dhaka during the course of the studio. I think these types of programs are a great way to ground the research in reality.
And as a fan of Miami and Miami Beach, I am curious to see what the teams come up with over the next 3 years.
Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash
Below is a short video that was created by the MIT Senseable City Lab, World Economic Forum and TomTom for a study on how people move in 100 cities around the world. They call it the Global Mobility Index.
It shows congestion levels (using real-time traffic data from TomTom), commute times, and an estimate for the percentage of trips that could be shared if people were willing to wait up to 5 minutes.
In the case of Toronto, they estimate that 99% of trips could be shared and that it would increase average speeds by ~7.9 km/h and reduce overall traffic levels by ~44.09%.
Their solution to solving traffic congestion is a cocktail that involves car-sharing, bike-sharing, and public transit. It’s about developing a “mobility portfolio.” Seems sensible.
I found myself wanting more information and data after watching the video. Still, it was interesting to see what the authors describe as the “pulse of our cities.”
If you can’t see it below, click here.
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