Hop, Skip, Go
How the Mobility Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rossant, founder of the nonprofit NewCities Foundation, and Baker, a former technology journalist, take a fascinating survey of the many disruptions, beyond ridesharing apps, coming for the transportation industry. During "the next stage of human mobility," they predict, innovators will seek to address traffic, waste, and environmental issues, not to mention the countless hours commuters waste in transit. The authors focus on the major cities, such as Los Angeles, Dubai, and Shanghai, where the need for saner traffic is most urgently felt. In addition to famous tech founders and their pet projects Elon Musk's Boring Company tunneling startup and Jeff Bezos's Amazon delivery drones Rossant and Baker check in on 3D-printed cars in the L.A. suburb of Torrance, bikes crafted out of repurposed industrial machinery in Vancouver, and navigation AIs in Shanghai. They also speak to Sonja Heikkil , who developed the transportation app MaaS (mobility as a service) in an attempt to solve Helsinki's pressing transit problems. Looking ahead to a future in which owning a car might be as anachronistic as playing music on a CD player, Rossant and Baker's study convincingly forecasts how new technologies might "change our cities, our economies, and the fabric of our lives."