The future of transportation lies in personalized services working seamlessly with mass transit planned and built with the new travel options already in mind, according to Barbara Wise, the point-to-point transport commissioner for New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state. “There’s a real shift toward personalizing services for people, whether that’s mass transit and making booking and payment easier, or making services more on-demand, whether that’s on a bus or anything like that,” Wise said in an interview with Bloomberg NEF. Wise has thought a lot about what transportation will look like in the years ahead. Appointed as the inaugural point-to-point transport commissioner for the New South Wales in 2016, Wise has focused on overseeing how a host of new transport reforms are put into action. The New South Wales Point to Point Transport Commission is an industry regulator for taxis, hire vehicles and ride-share services that began operating in November 2017. The commission was created after a task force -- formed after the transport market was disrupted following the introduction of ride-sharing to Sydney in 2014 -- recommended a new way of regulating transport in smaller vehicles. Since the reforms came in, the number of drivers providing services has about tripled while the government has pledged not to increase the size of the taxi fleet for four years. The vision for the next 40 years of transport in New South Wales is included in Future Transport 2056, a strategy that points out how mobility has already been shaken up by technology, data sharing and apps enabling flexible ways of matching customers with services. “We’ll be seeing more fleet operators and it will be transport as a service,” Wise said. “There will be a decline in car and vehicle ownership over time.”
The following interview has been edited for length:
Q: What does the future of urban transportation look like for a city like Sydney?
A: The New South Wales government has in the last 12 months put out a document called Future Transport 2056, which is its vision for the future of transport in New South Wales, not just in Sydney. What it comes down to is recognizing that people are demanding a personalized service. So there's a real shift toward personalizing services for people, whether that's mass transit and making booking and payment easier, or making services more on-demand, whether that's on a bus or anything like that. Even regarding ferries, we've had announcements about trialing on-demand ferry services in Sydney.
Personalization is a key to what's coming in the future in New South Wales, but putting it simply, mass transit is still the best way of getting a lot of people around, so there are significant infrastructure programs, particularly in Sydney, around improving metro services, train services, buying more trains. It really is a focus on big mass-transit projects plus the personalized service and recognizing that things like automated vehicles are coming and so forth.
I think we'll be seeing more fleet operators and it will be transport as a service. There will be a decline in car and vehicle ownership over time.
Q: Does the talk of personalized services take some of the pressure off municipalities and state governments to invest in infrastructure?
A: In Future Transport 2056, they really talk about planning for place. That means you need to look at not just running a train line through an area, but also looking at what you need at that train station and the precinct around it to enable the more personalized vehicles to access that space. It will change the way design works in local areas rather than take any pressure off.
Q: How will the companies be sharing pricing data? Will there be a centralized platform/app that consumers can use and, if so, will it be government or privately operated?
A: One of the things that Transport for New South Wales has done a lot of work on is open data. As part of Future Transport 2056, there's something called the Future Technology Roadmap and there's a lot of work underway now. They've got something called the digital accelerator and that's working on a challenge with startups and the commercial sector partnering to figure out how you get a mobility-as-a-service type product up and going in Sydney. They've shortlisted six participants and they're working through the details. There are quite a few complexities to work through, but data exchange is part of the picture and part of sharing with Transport for New South Wales to make it work.
As part of transport's congestion management program, they already use really significant third-party sources of data as well. I know there are some app developers out there who would like to get price comparison going, but that so far hasn't been a focus of Transport New South Wales. We've been more focused on how you get people moving better.
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