Future of Urban Mobility

 

Overview:

Google’s urban innovation sister-company Sidewalk Labs was in the process of building a smart city in Toronto. Their urban mobility team wanted to develop mobility systems that serve the needs of next-generation of cities while tailored to the local communities the urban development would serve.

 
 

  • Sidewalk Labs

  • Smart City, Transportation, Public Sector

  • Exploratory Research

 
 

Research Approach:

 

  • Expert Interviews

    Conducted 14 in-depth expert interviews with traffic engineers, transit directors, first responders, etc. to understand current explicit mobility pain points.

  • Shadowing

    Shadowed a parking enforcer, paramedic, police officer, taxi driver, and delivery truck driver to see latent pain points as they navigate the current city infrastructure.

  • Scenario Planning

    Facilitated a workshop with provocations around trends like“rise of shared mobility”, “high use of driverless cars” to come up with different future scenarios to plan around.

  • Competition Landscape

    Mapped startups and incumbents that are potential competitors or investment partners as the client builds some of the ideated concepts into marketable solutions.

 

Results:

Through the project, the client was able to:

  • Understand pain points faced by local municipalities and understand purchase motivations for upgrading their city’s current mobility systems.

  • Make safe “big bets” of urban mobility products to focus on developing that will be applicable in different future scenarios of connected cities and urban transportation.

  • Start strategic conversations with startups that can be potential investment or partnerships targets from companies profiled through the competitor landscape mapping.

 
 

Final Deliverables:

  • Containing pain points and purchase motivation for municipalities to consider upgrading their city's mobility systems.

  • Visualizing the components and capabilities needed to build these next-generation concepts.

  • Evaluating build/buy/partner decisions for these concepts and early market sizing.