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Cities the world over are reaching their geometric limits of urban mobility, causing congestion like never before and leading to all manner of social injustice — from health and safety concerns to sharpened economic inequality.
This is a brief introduction to our ongoing Exploration into Urban Congestion — to explore ways of easing the tight-knit traffic on our streets and clear the path for a freer and more vibrant life in the city.
Explorations are how we align our interests, energy and collective imagination to help address urgent societal challenges. We also have open Explorations investigating Climate Migration & Humanity of Truck Drivers.
Demand for urban last-mile delivery is expected to grow by almost 80% by 2030, leading to 21% more congestion and 33% more emissions in the world’s 100 largest cities
World Economic Forum, 2020
According to the UN, in 2050 the world will be home to just under 10 billion people, with almost 70% of them living in rapidly-growing urban areas. In 1950 that percentage was 30%. In Manila, the average length of time spent commuting every day is currently ninety minutes. In Bangkok, it is three hours. Cities all over the world are growing faster than ever in size and scale, and in many countries, it’s already causing urban areas to reach their infrastructural breaking point.
But unchecked congestion is not only a nuisance — it sharpens the ecological impact of urban mobility, leading to increased emissions, worsened air quality and public health crises; it further amplifies the inequality of mobility access, reducing opportunities for those already lowest on the socioeconomic ladder; it places the worst costs of failed urban planning on the citizen, increasing cost of urban living even as it decreases our quality of life.
In Sao Paulo, there are sometimes traffic jams that stretch over two hundred kilometres, and air pollution conditions are so extreme that they’re responsible for almost three times as many deaths as car accidents. After convincing a group of British volunteers to take their commutes wearing electrode caps, researchers from Hewlett-Packard found that peak-hour travellers stuck in traffic experience worse stress levels than fighter pilots or riot police amongst a mob of angry protestors.
There’s no way around it: the future of our world is urban. And congested cities increase the cost of civic life — economic, social, environmental and physical — just as they reduce our sense of agency, freedom and opportunity. If we’re ever to ensure a functioning, liveable reality for the majority of humanity, we need to take steps today to untangle the tightening chokehold that congestion has on our cities.
Adding to the strain that rising populations place on cities is the increasing demand for fast, next-day deliveries on e-commerce orders. In New York City, where 1.5 million packages are delivered every single day, deliveries to households have overtaken commercial deliveries for the first time ever, and it’s pushing trucks further into neighbourhoods that they wouldn’t previously frequent. As a result, cars in the busiest parts of Manhattan are moving 23% slower than at the beginning of the decade, and since 1990 air pollution from cars and trucks have risen 27%.
And it’s only going to get worse; a recent report from World Economic Forum predicts demand for urban last mile delivery to grow by almost 80% by 2030, leading to 36% more delivery vehicles in the world’s largest cities. The authors of the report expect congestion to rise 21% and emissions 33% as a direct result of e-commerce demand if effective interventions aren’t taken. “Congestion and emissions from e-commerce delivery are already putting stress on city traffic patterns,” says Christoph Wolff, Head of Mobility at WEF, “and this pressure will only rise from growing demand unless effective intervention is quickly taken by both cities and companies.”
Likewise, the platformisation of all manner of mobility services is widely considered to be worsening, rather than improving, traffic conditions. In San Francisco, the birthplace of techno-utopian transportation, researchers found that ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft were responsible for two-thirds of the increase in congestion between 2010 and 2016. Similarly — and despite their mission statements of curing traffic congestion — navigation apps are deemed by some experts to be creating more problems than they’re solving. “If these companies were ever subpoenaed, we strongly believe their data would clearly reveal that,” claims Alexandre Bayen, the director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies in the recent SOM Thinkers book, The Future of Transportation.
There’s no way around it: the future of our world is urban. And congested cities increase the cost of civic life — economic, social, environmental and physical — just as they reduce our sense of agency, freedom and opportunity. If we’re ever to ensure a functioning, liveable reality for the majority of humanity, we need to take steps today to untangle the tightening chokehold that congestion has on our cities.
Keep browsing: Read about the tools and collaborators we’re working with on this Exploration.
