In the first of two episodes of the CityAge Podcast recorded at the World Economic Forum’s Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit last week, we chat about transportation. From the use of data to improve transportation, to real-world innovations in use today, to the largest mass transit system in the US (believe it or not, schoolbuses!) and much more. Our three special guests share stories from the front lines of one of our greatest urban challenges and opportunities today: Jennifer Holmes, Global Cities, Transport & Infrastructure Industry Lead at Accenture; Ritu Narayan, Founder and CEO of Zūm; and Laura Fox, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Streetlife Ventures.
In the first of two episodes of the CityAge Podcast recorded at the World Economic Forum’s Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit last week, we chat about transportation. From the use of data to improve transportation, to real-world innovations in use today, to the largest mass transit system in the US (believe it or not, schoolbuses!) and much more. Our three special guests share stories from the front lines of one of our greatest urban challenges and opportunities today: Jennifer Holmes, Global Cities, Transport & Infrastructure Industry Lead at Accenture; Ritu Narayan, Founder and CEO of Zūm; and Laura Fox, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Streetlife Ventures.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the City Age Podcast. I'm Alon Markovich, your co-host and managing director of City Age, and I'm thrilled to be back today with Lisa Chamberlain, my co-host, Lisa, how are you?
Speaker 2: I'm doing well. I'm so excited to be back here and talking about the Urban Transformation
Speaker 1: Summit. For everyone listening, Lisa and I got to see each other face-to-face, which doesn't happen very often, and we got to meet in Detroit, which is an amazing city that is the host for the third year in a row for the World Economic Forums Urban Transformation Summit, and we got to be there with more than 150 other guests who came in from, I dunno, 25, 26 different countries from every continent on earth, but Antarctica, a mix of public and private sector that was just a flurry of ideas and insights and wonderful conversation.
Speaker 2: I think flurry is the right word. So many strategy sessions where people actually had the chance to have small group conversations, form new partnerships and just really go deep. I can't tell you how many people came up to me afterwards and said they really appreciate that part of the Urban Transformation Summit, that they're not being talked at the whole time that they are talking with people and really exploring in a deep way the topics that they feel passionate about.
Speaker 1: It was the first time in our three seasons of podcasting that we had the chance to interview our guests in person. And today's episode is a bit different than normal. We have multiple guests on What's the theme of the three interviews that you picked for today?
Speaker 2: So today we're talking about all things transit and transportation, and we have three different people coming at it from three different perspectives. The beauty of talking with people in person is you can really look them in the eye across the table. It just makes for a much more fluid conversation. You're getting their facial expressions and all the things that they're feeling and feeling exuberant about.
Speaker 1: Transportation probably is number one on the list of urban developments in terms of technologies impact on urban life. 15 years ago we weren't talking about shared mobility, we weren't talking about autonomous, we weren't talking about electric. There's just so many ways in which technology is impacting transportation, and I know you spoke with, you must've touched on that with some of the guests today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what we talked about was the competition for space. Now as all of these things are coming online and how cities are struggling to manage it, while there is a lot of difficulty right now around transit, there's also a lot of innovation happening and that's definitely a good thing. We're sort of at a choke point I think in a lot of places right now, but we're also at a turning point right now.
Speaker 1: That's a great optimistic place to start with our first guest, that turning point that we're at, so here is Lisa's conversation with Jennifer Holmes of Accenture.
Speaker 2: So
Speaker 3: I'm Jennifer Holmes, I'm with Accenture. I lead our city's transportation and infrastructure practice globally. So we're often working with government at all levels, whether that's at a federal, state or a city and local level government.
Speaker 4: So tell us about why the United States seems to be going in the wrong direction in terms of traffic deaths.
Speaker 3: So I think when you think about transportation specifically in the United States, safety is always at the number one goal or objective. Again, whether it's the federal US Department of Transportation or a state or a city. What is interesting is that we were making great strides and bringing down the number of deaths every year from traffic incidents. And a few years ago, all of a sudden it started to increase at an alarming rate, sort of reversing the progress that we had made over a number of years. And the number one reason is cell phones. We were distracted driving at this point. It's interesting to see the data that gets collected because we can track and see where cell phones are and when you start to map that and see the movement, you can see every time a cell phone moves in a vehicle and the entire map can be covered with dots indicating the drivers, not just yourself, but the one next to you, the one in front of you are all being distracted in some way, shape or form by a cell phone. So it's really alarming that that's the thing that is really driving that safety imperative that we have, again, from the federal government state or local communities about how do we keep people safe?
Speaker 4: And so what should we be doing to fix this?
Speaker 3: So I think so often we wait to react, we need to see evidence of an intersection, for example, being unsafe because people have been injured or unfortunately died, and it doesn't just take one injury or death. It usually needs to take multiple in order to motivate or prioritize making some sort of an intervention in either the flow of traffic, the way the lights work, bike lanes, those sorts of things. That can easily change how the flow of traffic goes through an intersection. But that's too high of a price to have to pay.
Speaker 4: It is indeed. It is indeed. And I've experienced that myself in Brooklyn where a particular intersection became notorious and the worst tragedies happened at this intersection. Two little kids died and mothers were injured. And it wasn't until that really horrific one did the intersection get redesigned.
Speaker 3: And I think what's interesting is anecdotally, I feel like we all sort of know like, oh, that's the terrible intersection or that section of road is always scary. We know anecdotally, but government can't take action. Cities can't take action just by the anecdotal, you actually have to have hard data. And so one of the things that we've been working on in Accenture is how to get more predictive to be proactive in those safety interventions. How can we use different data sources that may be set up an intersection, whether that's lidar technology or mapping things from our cell phone data that is available to be looked at as far as movement goes, taking different types of data, layering it on top of each other and giving a view, a real-time view of an intersection to transportation engineer with a city or with a state d o t to say, oh, I can see now repeated patterns incorporate some generative AI as well to start being very predictive and seeing over time, this is the kind of flow that's happening with traffic with these near miss data that can be collected.
Speaker 4: Help me understand the relationship between cell phone use and dangerous intersections though, because if there's a lot of fatalities that is certain intersection, it's not just the cell phone use,
Speaker 3: Right? It's not just the cell phone use, but we can use it for a pedestrian, for example. We can think about the geolocation information that's on a cell phone that can be aggregated up to understand the movement of people, pedestrians, bicyclists, cars to see where people are positioned in the movement through intersections. Layer that on with the timing of lights, layer that in with the weather. How did that particular may have played a role in that traffic that particular day put in event data to see all of a sudden we've got a surge from an event being released nearby, population increases, traffic flows for just basic commuting. You can start layering in multiple dimensions of data and then start to be able to see, oh, when these conditions happen, this is when potentially near misses go up.
Speaker 4: So what's the solution then?
Speaker 3: So the solution is when those engineering planners can say, okay, I don't have to wait for children to die or mothers to be injured. I can now see what either the traffic flow might be. I need to change a bike lane. I need to predict a left-hand turn more. I need to change the timing of lights. Those are the things that they can then also model and see how can we use the data to inform what will happen if I change this particular sequence or scenario. And that way they're able to take that action before someone gets injured, before someone has to die for them to say, this is why we need to make a change here.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of advances with different types of mobility now. So there's a lot of different vehicles, two wheels and three wheels on the street all the time now and in cities there's competition for space. How do you address that? I know a lot of transit advocates really want reduce the number of cars in cities, so that's one aspect of it, but tell me about some others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that it takes that kind of information to understand what's the right flow. You can make certain corridors more pedestrian friendly. I know sometimes when you're driving a car you don't like to see that because all of a sudden now you can't go down a particular piece of street that you did before, but yet that's what can protect the flow of traffic to attract pedestrians to go a certain way. So they're interacting less with traffic. I think that that's the reason why you can do certain one-way on a street. You can change the direction or lanes of traffic during certain times of day. There are ways in which to influence that congestion or incentivize behavior that it's easier now I'd like to ride a bike, but it doesn't seem safe for me to ride a bike because I don't have room. I'm competing on a two wheel vehicle with a large truck. So how to be able to see who's using the road, who would like to use the road and be able to create the space, whether it's again, a pedestrian or a bike or a motorcycle or a car to be able to have everyone be able to operate in this more safe way. So you collect the data, you put it together into a story,
Speaker 5: A clear picture. Do you also make recommendations though based on that
Speaker 2: Data?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that's the most powerful thing about data. We talk about it a lot. It's becoming ubiquitous in a lot of ways, but it's really more about the insights. How do we do something with that? I think that's the unique part of it. It's not just collecting the data and showing it, but it's how do you then make insights or recommendations based on that? And I think that's where it's exciting when you think about the opportunity for generative AI to be able to process so much data so quickly to be able to run different kinds of scenarios in that way, it allows then you as a human or the transportation engineer as a human being to then focus on what action do I now take? I don't have to spend my time processing or trying to make sense of all of this information that's being provided to me. And now I can do the critical thinking and the expertise that I have in a particular field to say, okay, now I know what action needs to be taken and be focused on making that change.
Speaker 2: Lisa, that was a great talk with Jennifer. Who do you have up next up? We speak with Ritu, Nian, C E o, and founder of Zoom, spelled with the U. She's focused on improving the largest mass transit system in the us, which is surprisingly school buses.
Speaker 5: Zoom is a mobility company, it's modernizing student transportation, essentially re-imagining how yellow school bus, iconic yellow school bus network works. The idea of Zoom actually came from a very personal experience of mine in 2013, 14, I was working at eBay when I started facing this problem of how to pick up and drop off my children safely, reliably and sustainably while I was still at work. And interestingly, my mom, who's an educator in India, left the job for exact same reason because she couldn't find safe reliable options for me and my siblings. It was kind of an aha moment that this problem is universal, this problem is generational and nothing has changed. So I wanted to change this problem. We started out serving end customers or parents. We were initially called Uber for kids, but very soon school started asking us to use this platform for their use cases. And that led us to an insight and even bigger go-to market and business model. And today we exclusively work with schools and school districts in re-imagining the yellow school bus network.
Speaker 4: And you are also contributing to the energy transition by, do you own a fleet of EVs or are you acquiring them or do you rent them? How does that work?
Speaker 5: Zoom is modernizing this entire system by two things. One is digitization. You would be surprised to know the system is so antiquated 80 years old.
Speaker 4: Oh no, I know. I know from experience
Speaker 5: Things work the same way like you and I did. Our grandparents did very little technology being touched. Parents used to tell us they can track their packages, they can track their food, but they have no idea where their children are. So first aspect we have done is with the help of digitization, we have improved the utilization, we have improved the optimization of the routes, and by doing that, we save schools and school districts money and we save children time and we actually improve the utilization of the entire fleet for the entire area and the city. The second aspect of it is electrification. Student transportation in the US as the largest mass transit system, 27 million kids travel commute twice daily, even on the second largest mass transit system airlines, only 9 million people travel on any given day and they're half a million school buses, less than 2% of them are electrified, 98% of them are still ice versus, so our business model is as we take on the contracts, we basically lease out or finance the fleet and the yard and we hire the drivers, we deploy a technology and we execute on the entire operations.
Speaker 5: And we within the two to five years of owning those contracts, we electrify the fleet. And interestingly, schoolbus is the largest battery on wheel. It's almost like equivalent to six to eight Tesla batteries with very predictable commute hours. It's not used in the peak demand of energy, which is evenings and summers. And given that we have a platform which knows exactly when to charge the bus, when to discharge the bus, we are using the school bus fleets to provide energy back to the grid. And it's a very important thing of how something which was very fundamental part of taking kids to and from school and other places is now becoming part of the community in terms of providing resilience and grid resilience in those community and eliminating the need of very polluting peaker plants.
Speaker 4: Yes, I would just say I fully understand the stress of not knowing when the bus is coming, you're on your way to work, you're taking your kids to the bus stop and it's not showing up and you're freaking out, don't know what to do. You can't get through to dispatch. And so the scale of the problem is huge, right? You just laid out how big it is. You're just putting a dent in this right now, right? You are serving a lot of people, but there's many more people that are not being served yet. How are you going to scale?
Speaker 5: So for us, the first step was making sure that our value proposition work with large districts. Today we have some of the largest district, Oakland Unified, San Francisco Unified, LA Unified, which is the second largest district in the country with thousand schools and 10,000 kids and any given day commuting, we have Harvard County which has 20,000 students commuting. So once the districts have started adopting and they have seen the value proposition, our goal in next three to four years is to scale this up to 24 different states and make it available to as many students and families as possible in the country.
Speaker 4: Given the scale of the problem that you're solving, are you seeing other people coming into the market doing a similar thing?
Speaker 5: Most of our competition is against the legacy providers who have been in this industry for 30, 40, 50 years, and their business model, as you know, innovators Dilemma, very much works against doing innovation or deploying technology. Their business model is actually deploying one more school bus on the road because it's one size fits all, and that's how they make revenue. Zoom's business model on the contrary is optimizing and reducing the number of buses and reducing the number of facets and improving the state of optimization because less the number of facets, less the time on the road, the more the battery time available once those assets are transitioned to electric. So we look at the system very holistically and also we are in a very unique position where we fell on the right place at the right time and evolved the solution over a period of time. We don't have exactly anybody in the new form competing with us, but lots of point solution in terms of technology and others, and it's an integrated end-to-end platform that has really inspired the districts to adopt us so fast.
Speaker 4: It's interesting that you say that part of the business model is to have fewer buses on the road, and I'm sure that's music to a lot of people's ears, and particularly in the mobility world that are really trying to reduce congestion and pollution. It's interesting that one of the trends now is kids are forming these bike buses. Should we be trying to reduce dependence on school buses in the future?
Speaker 5: Our motor And the goal Zoom is a very sustainability oriented company, is to use the right size of the right more of the transportation for the right group of the people. If kids are living closer within a mile within a couple of miles and they can walk and they can bike, that's the best mode of transportation. If they are far off three miles or beyond and they face a lot of traffic or they go for special classes here and there and activities, then buses might be the best mode of transportation. Even within that. We don't take it as one size fits all in the previous years. And the legacy providers, even if one child was going on that mountain or five kids were going, the same big vehicle was used.
Speaker 4: So it was the same size bust no matter, no matter whether it was fitting the need or not. And so you actually have different size fleets, right? Absolutely. You have cars, you have vans and things
Speaker 5: Like this. That's right. And that is being enabled by the platform and technology because technology is able to adjust what size of the fleet you should be using. Everybody is notified, driver knows the navigation, everything that happens. And just to give you an example, in San Francisco they were using 236 buses when we came and we reduced 293 buses. District is saving $3 million a year, $15 million over five years by using Zoom. And that's the kind of impact. To give you another stats about production in the commute hours in Oakland Unified, 70% of the students were traveling more than an hour before we came in.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: After we came in, less than 10% of the students were traveling more than an hour because everything was
Speaker 4: Because you optimized the route.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. And we deploy the right size of vehicle for the right size of the group while everything was done on pen and paper. It was one size fits all very highly an optimized system. That's the kind of impact which excites us to the families, to the districts, to the environment.
Speaker 4: It's really an amazing disruption story. This is the disruption we need. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 6: Thank you Lisa. Loved that conversation you had with tu. Who do we have up next?
Speaker 4: Rounding things out is Laura Fox. She's the co-founder of Streetlight Ventures. She invests in mobility innovations including public EV charging, which we need a whole lot more of if we're going to make this transition to all electric vehicles. Transportation
Speaker 6: Is a really complicated space when it comes to reducing emissions. It's one of the largest source of emissions globally. It's the fastest growing. It's grown about 80% over the last 30 years. And so really significant amounts of growth and it's the least discussed because of its complexity. And so one example I love to highlight is even in the largest climate gathering that we have annually at cop, there was only a dedicated day to transportation starting in 2019. And a lot of those conversations have revolved around the ice isto electric transition, and there's a whole broad ecosystem to explore in terms of what are other incremental things that we can be doing.
Speaker 7: So in other words, you're trying to take the conversation beyond just electrifying cars to the broader realm of transit. So tell me about that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, really think about it of electrifying cars is really important, but when we just think about geometry of a city in terms of how cities can be efficient, individual vehicles are one of the most inefficient forms on the street. So transit can be 20 x more efficient, something like bike lanes and throughput, there can be 12 x more efficient. And so really see a lot of room for efficiency, especially as we're starting to see mega cities in the US and globally losing. I think New York is something like losing 30 billion a year to hours lost to stuck in commutes. And then secondly, there's just the how do we decarbonize as fast as we possibly can. And so electrification of vehicles today can save maybe about 50% of the carbon that's submitted, but there's also some challenges in terms of providing the electricity that's required through the grid just to make the iced electric transition, we need to invest something like 130 billion into the US grid.
Speaker 6: The infrastructure bill that just came out one of the largest in decades in the US allocated 5 billion. And so that's a pretty wide gap to think about navigating. And so really means that we need to be thinking a lot about energy management when it comes to electric vehicles and exploring what are some of these other options. And so we oftentimes think about it as what do we need to be able to make better decisions? So enable things. How do we rebuild the cities that we have today in develop markets? How do we build net new and existing? What is it that people are actually using the offer that's on the streets? And then how are we maintaining an operating all of this? And so on that, how do we make better decisions and enable people to make those? One company that I like to call out there is called climate view.
Speaker 6: And Climate view can work with cities and with businesses, but especially with cities to establish a baseline of what's your emissions profile Today they have a number of different interventions on the platform that they've worked with cities on over time. So if you implement these, what could it look like in terms of reducing your amount of emissions? And then once you start on that platform, you could actually be reporting out to citizens in terms of what this looks like. And so as we think about the pain points and individual decisions that we're going to be facing for the larger collective good, I get really excited about platforms like that that enable that quickness of decision making as well as transparency. There's a great story related to some of that. That was in New York City. The Department of Transportation commissioner there, Jeanette Han had a whiteboard in her office under some time
Speaker 7: Ago,
Speaker 6: Which is some time ago. But she had a very paper-based system of building up bike lanes. So she would consistently have staff show up and say, how many bike lanes did you build? What did that look like? Add the mark to this board and this consistent tracking. And so I imagine situations like that, which happened a long time ago, if someone like that was enabled with something that could be really transparent, could constantly be showing staff and citizens the outcomes of some of these projects, I think that that's really exciting. And then there's things like rebuild and many developed economies. We have an existing road network, existing streets, and so it's less about building totally net new and more about adapting what we have.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the adoption is challenging. There's a lot of competing interests. So give us some examples of maybe some best practices there.
Speaker 6: So many competing interests. I mean, there's both a physical layer here in terms of the types of materials when you're doing normal course of business, roadwork repairs and others that lower c o two kind of asphalt or other forms of pavement. And then there's also things like digital infrastructure management. And a company that I think is doing really interesting work in this space is called Hayden ai. And they install in bus windshields and they monitor streets to look at traffic violations uses of individual vehicles and bus lanes or in bike lanes or double parking and things like that. And so can allow a city to more automatically enforce some of the ways that they would like to repurpose and reuse some of their streets, which I think is really important
Speaker 7: Deployed.
Speaker 6: That's been deployed in a number of cities
Speaker 7: And we seen any results in terms of how does it actually get people to stop doing it?
Speaker 6: It gets people to stop doing it. The enforcement is automated, so it's not like you need to be sending a ton more people into the streets. You don't need to install fixed infrastructure in terms of every single posts throughout the city has some of this technology that can be repaired back in a depot. So from an operations and maintenance standpoint, it's really efficient too. And so it's a really interesting solution. And
Speaker 7: I would imagine it's probably not that expensive.
Speaker 6: Exactly. Yeah. Because not installing it everywhere across the city and it's generating revenue for a city because now all of a sudden you're able to take it and enforce actions that are incorrect. And in a short and medium term scenario, you're generating incremental revenue for the city, which you can use to finance things like electrification of buses or adding new bus lanes because now you have a revenue stream to add capacity to. And I think that these instances where technology can support cities providing better services is really important and exciting because it means that the better that we have and the higher quality of them, the more people that are going to take public transportation.
Speaker 2: That's ultimately the
Speaker 7: Goal. The goal
Speaker 6: Is
Speaker 2: Just to hand out tickets.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Although maybe a little bit,
Speaker 6: But yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: That's great. So what are you most excited about right now?
Speaker 6: Anytime. I'm excited about a lot of areas. I mean, I really get excited about some transit tech, some micro mobility tech, some of this naughty infrastructure pieces. And specifically on the infrastructure side, I'm always looking for ways that if we're going to do one piece of infrastructure, it has multiple different knock-on effects and benefits. And so another company to call out is called VO posts. They do lamppost based charging. And one of the reasons why I love that in an urban ecosystem is that typically in most American cities, it costs a hundred thousand dollars to trench. So to access the electrical grid and then to route that to an EV charger. So that's before even the cost of the hardware of the charger comes in. For lampposts, it costs something like the cost of labor, so maybe $2,000, like 1.5 K to upgrade and pull additional capacity in the lampposts. And then the city gets the benefit of being able to use this kind of now upgraded lampposts so they can install five G chargers. The lamppost
Speaker 7: Does need to be upgraded.
Speaker 2: It's my understanding that only
Speaker 7: Los Angeles is the only
Speaker 2: City that has the
Speaker 7: Proper voltage. Every other city in the United States does
Speaker 6: Not.
Speaker 7: And so it does require
Speaker 6: An upgrade. It does require an upgrade, though. It's much more simple than the trenching approach to it. And so I think it's just it's simple, faster, lower cost, and then you as a city get to leverage your existing infrastructure for these things like air quality monitoring. Right? Really top of mind for people right now. Traffic monitoring, if you wanted an infrastructure five G towers as opposed to standalone five G towers, which we've seen come up in a number of different cities
Speaker 2: In New York.
Speaker 6: Yes, they're very big and ugly. Yes, we call them the Q-tip. The Q-tip, yeah. Yeah. And right now they're nice and shiny and new, but who knows what they're going to look like over time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that was Laura Fox, our third of three transportation themed interviews that really fit well together, the three of them. Aside from transportation, was there one takeaway you had, Lisa, from when you looked at all three of them or after the three conversations?
Speaker 2: Well, transit is clearly in Fluxx. There's a lot going on. There are problems that need to be solved, but there's also a lot of innovation that's coming online, and it's really just a question of scale. So it's all about scaling, scaling, scaling up these new innovative solutions that are going to reduce emissions, reduce congestion, increase productivity, and just quality of for people.
Speaker 1: Kudos to yourself, Lisa, for bringing those people together to the rest of your extended World Economic Forum team. Thank you for bringing us in on it again, it was just great. What do we have on tap for two weeks from now? From our next episode,
Speaker 2: Part two from the Urban Transformation Summit focuses on large scale urban regeneration developments and how to put social impact at the center of these projects. And to discuss this, we have Gila Omar, vice President of Social Impact at the Daniels Corporation based in Toronto, Dr. Eloisa Clementi, she's the president and c e O of Invest Atlanta, and Amy Tabari, social value director at Avis and Young based in London.
Speaker 1: I love that we split this into two separate podcasts because it was the forum and the summit that brought it together. I think that the fact that social impact and innovation were both discussed and were both the focus at the Urban Transformation Summit is part of what made that special. So I'm excited to chat with you more to share the conversations you had in a couple of weeks. Thank you everybody for listening. We'll see you next time on the CDH Podcast.