Next Stop
Transcriber: Justin Leydon
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
So growing up, I’d take long walks
to the streets of Bangalore
with my mother,
and that’s the city that she grew up in.
And as we’d walk,
she’d point out how the city had changed
from when she was a kid.
Where in front of us
stood well-lit streets
was once forest land that turned
pitch-black once the sun set,
and where we saw apartment blocks
and shopping centers
was once just space in between buildings.
She’d also point out how
some buildings didn’t change one bit.
And I would listen in amazement
because I get to see the city
for what it once was.
And I also get this time lapse
of a cityscape popping up in front of me:
buildings, roads being paved,
people flooding in, and slowly forming
into the city that I was in.
But this isn’t the story
of just Bangalore;
it’s the story of every city.
This is Shanghai in 2020;
this is Shanghai in 1984.
This is Dubai in 2020
and Dubai in 1984.
At the risk of stating the obvious,
we are organizing really fast,
and at the rate that we’re going,
by 2050, 70% of our entire population
will live in some form of a city.
And this is relevant because cities
have become the engines for human life -
it’s where we thrive -
but they’re really
expensive engines to maintain.
Cities eat up about 75% to 80%
of all the energy we consume globally,
and fossil fuels, even today,
make up a majority of that supply.
This is what energy consumption
across the world looks like,
and if we take out fossil fuels,
that’s what it looks like.
So in our fight against climate change,
it’s worth considering that a lot
of this fight sits in our cities.
Now I’m a service designer, and
for the last year and a half,
I’ve got a chance to jump into many
research sessions, facilitate workshops,
and map different parts of the transport
and city ecosystem as it sits today.
And all of this has started making me
look at cities a little bit differently.
Today I’d like to share
a few things I’ve learned
and share an idea that could be an ally
in our fight against climate change
and making cities a lot more sustainable.
When I zoom out, a city
is movement, lots of movement:
people, cars, vans, buses, cyclists
all buzzing from one place to another,
And all this movement costs the city
25% to 30% of all the energy it consumes,
and while this number is significant,
it doesn’t actually account
for the knock-on effect
all this movement has on how
the city develops in the first place,
or how movement makes way
for different kinds of economic activity
to actually start.
So if we start paying
attention to how we move,
we can actually have a big impact
in changing how much energy cities consume
and why they consume that energy.
And the good news is - it’s coming -
(Laughter)
is that there already
is a mobility revolution afoot,
some really powerful ideas that are going
to rise up to this challenge,
but it’s going to take a lot of time
for these solutions to manifest,
especially globally.
So why don’t we consider
solutions right under our noses,
ideas that already exist
that we can build on?
What if I told you there
was an old piece of technology
that could be the key to making our cities
a lot more sustainable,
a lot more livable,
and importantly, a lot more fair?
It’s something we’re all
really familiar with.
It’s called … the bus.
Now, the bus has a very special
relationship with the city.
For starters, the bus increases
our roads’ passenger-carrying capacity,
and in the space of three cars, a double
decker bus carries about 90 people,
something we use
about 70 cars for on our roads,
and, of course it goes without saying,
this reduces congestion
and makes our air cleaner
and also saves a lot of time
we spend commuting.
The bus also allows anyone and everyone
in the city to move,
movement being the essence
of urban living.
So without the need to own
or rent your own vehicle,
you actually get access
to hospitals, to schools, to work,
and to anything
you need for a decent life.
Another important thing a bus does
is it allows cities
to develop a lot more densely,
and what that means for you and me
is we don’t need to take long trips
to get to the places we need to go
and get the things that we need.
Now these are benefits that you would get
from all forms of public transport.
One thing that sets the bus apart,
especially given how fast the urbanizing,
is that it’s much, much easier to scale.
The bus doesn’t require massive
infrastructure spending or planning,
and it works quite well with our existing
city plans and road networks.
And then my favorite …
the bus is already everywhere.
Every city you go to
will have its own type of bus.
And I know I’ve spoken - I’ve put the bus
on a pedestal and I’ve really hyped it up,
and it’s because of the
potential the bus has which is:
imagine city life with fewer traffic jams,
cleaner air, easy access to everything,
and shorter commutes.
That would be quite amazing.
But the truth is
the bus is far from perfect.
For those of you who take the bus,
when was the last time
you really enjoyed that bus ride,
or how many times have
you been hanging out at a bus stop
just because the bus was late?
The benefits I mention are real,
and they show the full capacity in which
the bus can change our city lives.
But for it to get there,
we need to make riding the bus,
owning the bus, and managing the bus
a lot more easy and pleasant
for the city and its citizens.
So I really thought about what can we do
to make bus services more relevant,
and how how can we support the bus
on this journey to building
more sustainable cities?
And I thought of three key things:
The first thing is we
can empower the bus service,
and this sits at the government
and policy level
where they need to start
paying more attention
to make the bus service
more feasible and more attractive
for the people who will use the bus.
And what does that mean?
That means more space for bus lanes.
It means faster,
more convenient connections.
It means thoughtfully designing routes,
so we’re actually taking people
where they want to go,
and importantly, unlocking funding
so that we can adopt innovations
like electric buses a lot faster.
The next thing
we can do is innovate.
Innovation is something that sits
at an organization level.
That’s where our bus makers,
operators, and all the companies
in that bus ecosystem come together
because they’re responsible for delivering
a reliable and dependable service,
and for them to innovate,
it makes sense to start
paying closer attention
to the experiences and needs
of the people outside,
like citizens, passengers,
the city itself,
but also people inside,
like service technicians who fix the bus
because that’s what’s going to empower
them to deliver a quality service.
And also good experience
doesn’t just make the bus more attractive,
it actually makes it a lot more easier
to own, manage, and maintain.
And then the last action - participation,
and that’s where all of us come in.
And the easiest way to participate
is to take the bus,
especially when you can
and when it makes sense.
Taking the bus is probably
one of the most effective ways
you can reduce
your daily carbon footprint.
Another way to participate
is join the conversation -
telling Google Maps
or City Map or a similar app
that the bus was late or the bus was busy
can actually have a knock-on effect
on how someone else
plans their journey that day.
And if you want to take it one step
further and you’re enthusiastic,
cities across the world
have meetups and forums
where they’re looking
for new voices and ideas
to really strengthen our discussions
on how we move forward
towards more sustainable travel in cities.
And last but not least, consider voting
because at the end of the day,
it’s your taxpayer money
and my taxpayer money
that actually subsidizes fossil fuels
and is being used to sanction
much bigger city-level projects.
It makes sense to back
the people and the ideas that are working
towards more sustainable futures.
Now, I want to pause for a second
on participation
because for me this is one
of the most important things.
It’s one of the few actions
that sit within our locus of control
of what we can do on a daily basis,
and it’s also the part, the action,
that drives bottom-up energy
so that policy makers on top
and the organizations
actually start paying attention
to what the bus service needs to be,
and these actions can
transform a lot of things:
For starters, the bus
as we know it won’t exist;
it will start becoming
the best version of itself.
And then, importantly, it’s going to start
changing how we move across our cities
and how our cities grow.
And just to give you a sense of scale,
using a bus can help a city save millions
of gallons of fossil fuel every year.
And if we take a step back,
we have more than 10,000
cities across the world.
Imagine how much we can change
the energy conversation
and reduce our demand on energy
if we give a decent bus service
to each of these cities.
And as we step towards 2050,
where 70% of us are living
in some form of a city,
where the kids of today are now adults,
they’re parents,
and they’re walking down these streets
telling stories of change.
I’m optimistic that these
can be stories of positive change
because this narrative
is something that you and I
are fully capable of shaping today.
Thank you.
(Applause)