Frictionless travel in Los Angeles

Technology is shaping the future of transportation and slowly making it easier to leave the car at home or not own a car at all. Technology, mainly smartphone driven, is making it easier to leave the car at home by getting rid of unnecessary ‘friction’ when planning and paying for transport – be it simply requesting a rideshare on your phone or using an app to pay for bus tickets. LA is taking notice of this and, in particular, those who are supplying the services.

Steer Davies Gleave was invited to attend a new event organized by Los Angeles Metro, ‘Metro and the Digital Future’, which brought suppliers from all over the world to Metro’s headquarters to pitch new ideas for improving mobility and reducing reliance on the car through the use of new technologies.  The day focused on a number of key technologies, including trip planning, gamification, smart payments, concierge services and smart infrastructure.

Our ‘elevator pitch’ presented at the event was for an all-in-one mobility app that would encourage behavior change by making it easy to use and pay for travel. The app (for smartphone and smartwatch) would incorporate dynamic door-to-door multimodal trip planning, making use of live data sourced from Metro and from the general public. The idea, put together by SDG’s Technology team, focused heavily on personalization and the ability to ‘learn’ your regular trips. Importantly, the app would also allow you to pay for your entire trip, including Uber/Lyft and bikeshare, and offer incentives to try out new modes. It would take the complication or worry out of planning and paying for transport, including what to do when there is a disruption.

The Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, encouraged LA Metro to host this event and made an appearance to deliver the closing remarks. It is clear that the Mayor sees technology as a key piece of the puzzle to improving mobility in a city not known for its quiet streets and ease of travel. He wants to see LA become a ‘platform’ that developers can use to create new apps and services that offer new ways to move or to integrate ticketing across multiple modes (bikeshare included). Interestingly, his ambition is to create an all-in-one multimodal trip planning and payment app. We hope he was listening intently to our pitch!

After our short presentation we were quizzed by a panel of experts, including Chief Technology Officers of major North American transit agencies. They wanted to know more about how the app would work across multiple agencies – LA County has more than 88 cities and 30 transit agencies. This raised an interesting question of responsibility for quality data and coordination of information gathering and broadcasting. There’s no right answer but it was food for thought.