Seamless travel is a strong aspiration in human mobility. Today, our opportunities for travel are almost infinite. We can go practically everywhere, and often at quite low prices. But too often, getting from A to B remains more of a hassle than a real pleasure. This is especially true when travelling to less familiar places, where the challenge of understanding the options adds to the connection difficulties.
Seamless transport is not only about comfort. It is as much about economic growth or social inclusion. Getting semi-finished products just-in-time to the assembly line reduces capital costs. Linking up public transport in intelligent and fully accessible and intelligible ways may make the difference for someone being able to take a job as well as for someone visiting a foreign country.
’Seamless‘, after all, is just another way of saying that mobility is more efficient, anxiety-free against disruption. It means making people confident that they will be able to easily find and use the best travel option. It means ensuring that service disruptions in one component will be promptly addressed to minimise the impact on the user, with the help of all the other components. This should be a boon to all involved: users, operators, regulators, and investors, even insurers and society at large.
So if seamless mobility is the Holy Grail everyone is looking for, why isn’t it widely available?
Conventional wisdom holds that digital technology, by allowing unprecedented levels of information exchange in real time, will solve the co-ordination issue that is the crux for seamlessness. It is undeniable: big data on the servers of operators and smart phones in the pockets of users are a potentially powerful combination. Some of the benefits are already there and we can surely expect much more—for instance making it easier for foreign visitors to access travel information through translation and interpretation help.
Putting high tech at the core of our thinking about better mobility solutions is tempting. Transport certainly has a long history of focusing on technological innovation and now it is embracing digital technology with gusto.
Ultimately though, transport is not about technology and what it can do. It is about people and what they want to do. It should build on business models and behavioural patterns that make sense for companies, organisations and people involved. Technology is a powerful enabler but it won’t be enough to ensure seamless travel.
Even that very useful app on your smartphone is only the shiny tip of an iceberg. Underneath lies an invisible and complex structure of standards and regulations. Getting the support structure right can make or break innovative solutions as easily as demand. Sometimes seamless travel doesn’t happen because some outdated regulation simply prohibits an innovative practice, or because one element which makes sense from a holistic perspective is seen only as an additional cost by each of the partial service providers in the travel chain.
Agile, high-end regulation is vital for better physical connectivity. Good regulators will not just manage the status quo. They will also identify the ’missing links‘ (services to users or contractual arrangements between service providers) in seamless integration, and find ways to include those links in the regular scheme of things. We need savvy policy-makers and regulators as much as nerdy programmers.
So here, in a nutshell, is my three-ingredient seamless transport recipe for you to ponder: 1. Think of the user first and last; 2. Consider the enablers—high tech, low tech or other; 3. Ensure a sophisticated and agile regulatory response to customer requirements and technological opportunity.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.
