Whim App

The last few years have seen greater changes to urban

mobility than in most of the last century, the design of

which was largely influenced by the automobile. The vast

majority of these changes, adopted to varying degrees,

comes as a result of the smartphone and its ability to be

used for low-cost transportation platforms. This powerful

computer, which we now carry in our pockets, means people

in need of transport can be connected to others with spare

capacity, to locate a dockless bike or scooter on a map, to

offer or monitor routes based on traffic conditions, to buy

bus or train tickets, and a growing list of possibilities.

Recent years have seen applications such as Uber, Cabify,

Lyft, Didi and many others increase the availability of vehicles,

creating many more mobility options, and which still represent

a tiny change compared to what will happen when technologies

such as electric and autonomous-driving vehicles are introduced.

Automotive giants such as Daimler and BMW, and soon

Volkswagen, keen to improve its image after the dieselgate,

have signed on to this trend, flooding our cities with fleets of

vehicles ready to be driven at any time through an app.

In addition, the number of bike sharing programs around

the world has doubled since 2014, with a 20-fold increase

in the number of bicycles available in cities from Spain to

China. The new mobility companies have entered this

segment through acquisitions that foreshadow important

mergers and deployments, in the same way that has happened

with electric scooters, which began with several startups, which

have grown into unicorns thanks to an investment frenzy, and

now continues with the emergence of these mobility monsters,

generating what some have dubbed the “scooter economy”

based on the idea of “everything as a service.”

Mobility in cities will evolve into a service we use as needed:

transportation or mobility as a service, eliminating the idea of

owning an expensive, underutilized asset that contaminates

the air and has become the biggest problem in the vast majority

of cities around the world. But for all this to happen we need a

smoother transition; we cannot be expected to install 10 or 20

apps to manage the mobility options our cities offer, along with

public transport which also plays a fundamental role in getting

around our cities and that, thanks to successive waves of innovation,

will continue to do so in the future.