The Future Of Urban Mobility

Chris Free, general manager of Uber UAE, looks ahead to how urban mobility in the region can change for the better.

Urban mobility is increasingly becoming a buzzword in big global cities like Dubai, and rightly so. As more and more people migrate and settle in densely populated urban centers it’s important that cities tackle the issues of how people get around in a safe, convenient, and affordable way. Just buying a car is no longer the status quo.

Let’s jump into the numbers a little bit to start setting the context and understand where we are today. Right now, there are more than a billion cars in the world – that’s more than the combined populations of Europe and the US. In Dubai alone, we’ve seen the number of vehicles double to over 1.4 million in recent years, with an average annual increase of 8.2 per cent.

But what we need to look more closely at is not the number of cars, but rather how they are used. The vast majority of trips are taken individually. The next time you’re at the traffic lights, have a look around and in most cases a car will just have a driver and no one else.

Cars also sit idle for 95 per cent of the time, often in inner city parking garages or on neighbourhood streets. In the US, a fifth of the land area is dedicated to car parking, that equates to an area roughly 12 times the size of New York City. The opportunity cost is significant; these spaces could be used for parks, schools, hospitals and all manner of community focused buildings and spaces.