Urban Wishful Thinking Index
20th December 2024
Something called the Oliver Wyman Forum has worked with the University of California, Berkeley to publish an annual “urban mobility readiness index.” This is supposed to be a measure of how ready cities are for the coming “mobility revolution.” Unfortunately, it is more a measure of how ready cities are for the nineteenth-century’s mobility revolution.
The latest index ranks San Francisco as the best in the world when in fact it is one of the least mobile cities and urban areas in the nation. Dallas and Houston, two of the most mobile urban areas in America, are ranked 34 and 35 out of 70 major cities. Considering that Moscow, one of the most mobility-repressed cities in the world, is ranked not far below Houston, this index isn’t providing much help regarding urban mobility.
The problem is that the authors of the report have already decided what will constitute the coming “mobility revolution”: electric cars, bicycles, mass transit, and autonomous vehicles. While I agree about autonomous vehicles, the electric car revolution has stuttered to a near-stop and bicycles and mass transit were revolutionary in the 1890s but today are insignificant on an urban scale except, maybe, in extremely poor places such as Nairobi and Lagos.