Fantastic article by Johann Jungwirth, the Chief Digital Officer at VW, on the transformational trends impacting the automobile industry:

Many of us aren’t aware yet how historical the times we live in are. Because not just the automobile is being reinvented through the digital revolution, also the mobility itself is being reinvented: self-driving vehicles without steering wheel and pedals will be driving people and goods through the first cities in just a few years. Overall we are experiencing at the moment the disruption of the automotive industry in three dimensions which are orthogonal to each other:

1. Digitalization: from human drivers to self-driving vehicles
2. Sustainability: from combustion engines to electric drive
3. Urbanization: from ownership to shared mobility

FULL ARTICLE

An OpEd I wrote for the Seattle Times regarding Sound Transit’s proposed $54B expansion in the Seattle area.  :

AS Puget Sound taxpayers weigh Sound Transit’s $54 billion proposed expansion — a plan calling for 10 times the investment spent doubling the Panama Canal’s capacity — it’s important to ask whether it will be obsolete before it is done?

The light-rail and rapid-ride bus proposal called ST3 will be on the November general election ballot. As proposed, it would be constructed over the next 25 years and is projected to provide transit an additional 1 percent of daily trips by 2040. Some say “we must do something” to address the growing traffic congestion in the Puget Sound region and that ST3 is our best bet. But several major trends are fundamentally changing the nature of mobility around the world and will likely cause ST3 to be obsolete before the ribbons are cut.