Elaine Chao, the US Secretary of Transportation, is saying exactly what other DOT staff and the private sector are saying, that people with disabilities and older adults are going to be big winners with autonomous vehicles (AVs) because it won't matter if they are unable to drive. Hooray for these good intentions, but until now, no one was talking about accessibility and the work to get there. I'm including Ford's big announcement yesterday in this post because shared use, transit, and accessibility go hand in hand to provide independence for those with transportation challenges.
Transportation equity advances
The new Olli autonomous shuttle is as much an achievement as the process that led to the universal design of this AV and its interfaces - designed with and for people with disabilities as much as for the general public. Not only were people with disabilities invited in, listened to, and asked questions, but even more amazing is that the Olli team designed for accessibility for a range of different types of disabilities. Yes! People who use wheelchairs were included, but so were people with visual disabilities and more.
Kudos to Local Motors, the company that manufactures the Olli, for taking the time to find out what people need and want and feels comfortable and actively engaging with people with disabilities, who, for the most part, continue to suffer from terrible transportation challenges even with our best transit systems. (I may be involved with this field professionally, but it was a lesson when I needed to use the DC Metro elevators recently. Not easy to experience a normal trip even when elevators are working, but that is impossible most of the time due to constant elevator breakdowns and maintenance work. It's like SafeTrack all the time for anyone who is unable to use the escalators.)
Ford finds cities to be wonderful towns - where people don't want to drive
It's as if the executives of the Ford Motor Company watched this classic movie snippet, which is very multimodal, by the way, and got religion - the religion of transit, shared use, and mobility as a service (MaaS), and decided to go right for it. They've hung up the 1950s ethos of Detroit and gotten the 2018 bug of Brooklyn, Portland, and San Francisco.
In an amazing display of Ford's commitment to its new philosophy, the company announced yesterday that it is (1) buying - acquiring - TransLoc, a microtransit platform and transit routing software company, which builds upon the acquisition and expansion of Chariot into more cities; (2) acquiring Autonomic (which sounds like a cross between auto technology and off-the-shelf medicine), which can simply be described as a cloud-based MaaS platform; and (3) getting heavily into shared-use modes, MaaS, and non-emergency medical transportation. It's as if Ford is saying it will get into and replace all transit and shared-use modes except for the urban rail systems.
There's more: Because this is corporate America, a reorganization goes along with the news. Seems like Ford's Smart Mobility program is greatly expanding to include a mobility business group, and to integrate the almost-within-reach dream of AVs.
Now that's a big day for AVs. Maybe Ford will acquire Local Motors, the Olli company. Ford seems to be on a buying spree.
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