Sustainability in Transportation - How We Fix Congestion, Pollution & More with Nikolaj Koster, Head of Mobility at Deem, Inc.

This fascinating discussion with Nikolaj Koster, Head of Mobility at Deem, Inc. covers a broad range of topics, including:

1. Robotaxis:
     How artificial intelligence will help save the world and why your kid
     won’t need a driver’s license. Koster predicts that before the end of
     this decade , the majority of cars in our cities won’t have  a
     driver. Learn more about the role artificial intelligence is likely to
     play in our everyday life, what your futuristic trip across town might
     entail, and why we should all be excited about robots behind the wheel.

2. Sustainability
   There’s no  denying that climate change, sustainability, and the swiftly changing
     culture around travel is top of mind these days. Find out why the emphasis
     on “going green” is both more important and exciting than ever to Koster
     and what kind of impact he believes modern mobility solutions can really
     have.

3. Safety. 94% of all road accidents are caused by human error. Let’s talk about safety and perceived  safety (how safe is safe enough) for these new mobility systems

4. Multimodal  transportation and getting our streets back from the cars. When it comes
     to aspirations to revolutionize access to mobility options of all kinds,
     Koster doesn't hold back. Enjoy a good look at the vivid picture he paints
     of a future wherein commutes are active, flexible, sustainable, and fun -
     and public spaces less needed by vehicles are repurposed for people.

5. De-ownership:     A  mobility as a service future where we just pay for the minutes and miles
     we travel

6. Private vs. public MaaS: How does private operated MaaS systems work with
     the existing city operated mass transit? 

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Transcript

Jim Frazer  

Welcome everyone to another episode of the ARC Advisory Podcast. Today, my guest is Nikolaj Koster, head of mobility at DEEM, Inc., welcome, Nikolaj. You've had quite a broad career in the transportation and mobility industry. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your current organization?

Nikolaj Koster  

Absolutely. Yeah. My name is Nikolaj. And I'm Danish, by the way, I've been in the US for five years. And with Diem, my current workplace for about a year and a half. And before that, that's what sort of led me here was, first about seven years co-founding two mobility tech startups. And I then had a stint a company called Karhu, which is, as part of Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi mobility efforts, and then I joined our new mobility line of business.

Jim Frazer  

Great. Well, you today, you know, we invited you on to talk about sustainability and transportation, and in particular impacts on congestion and pollution, and traffic and transit time. How would you describe the current transportation situation?

Nikolaj Koster  

And not good. I mean, this can be this can go many ways, I first maybe just for context, I just want to save you, I don't know how many of the folks listening to this call have actually been to Denmark. But that's a very bicycle, heavy country. And it's a very public transportation country. So interestingly enough, I actually didn't own a vehicle until I moved to San Francisco, a year and a half ago, I want to say, a proper vehicle until San Francisco a year and a half ago. And I'm even considering if one vehicle is enough for our little family there to actually move around. So with that, sort of in mind that context in mind, I think, for me, it's been, it's been obvious, I want to say that, just from the work that I've done, and from what I see the work that other people do, people do, some of the main problems we have in the world is the reliance, the transportation problems we have in the world is the reliance on private car ownership. So you know, depending on how you counted something like 1.4 billion cars in the world right now. And I think it's plus 80% of all transportation in the world takes place in a private owned vehicle. And that, that just I think a lot of listeners probably on this, this podcast, know a lot of these sort of stats, that sort of automobility folks sort of rattle off, but it's, it's the issues around congestion in cities, because today's cities are really built for cars, not so much for pedestrians anymore. The cost of park most of the time, they are not utilized that much. Cars are not safe. Humans are not particularly great at driving an automotive vehicle safely, etcetera, etcetera. So, for me, yeah, private car ownership.

Jim Frazer  

Let's drill down a little bit into that how, how did you come to this industry? And what is transportation like, you know, in in Denmark versus, say, San Francisco, and you can give us particulars?

Nikolaj Koster  

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think if you when you google Copenhagen, which the capital of Denmark and you sort of, you'll see so many pictures of Pico on people on bikes the same way that you do in the Netherlands, and Amsterdam and so on, you see all politicians coming into the parliament on their bikes. And obviously, you're here in California, this is such a, this is such a car heavy country. This is how we move around here. And we have great public transportation in Denmark, not just in Denmark, there are many countries in the world that have a great public transportation here in San Francisco, not so much. We drove our car back from Los Angeles last night. It's been three days in Los Angeles. There's no There's almost no way you can move around efficiently in public transportation. It doesn't really, it's not it's not as great there.

Jim Frazer  

That's, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm thinking about my time in Copenhagen. And actually once I took a hovercraft over to Malmo

Did you years ago?

Jim Frazer  

Yeah. So what are we know? What does the future look like? Where what are the complications that you see for the world and moving from this car-based system? to something else?

Nikolaj Koster  

Yeah, let's, let's try to unpack that a bit. So it to me without being too sort of tech loving futurist naive, but I am, if, to me, it's if we take a timeline, and we look far enough out into the future, I think it's clear with the sort of, sort of AI advancements around perception, planning, electric vehicles, so the combination of an electric car with a car that can drive itself that is a, that that's something that will be deployed across the world at some stage in the future. And then I think the question then is, how do we advance that? How do we get there quicker with the advantages that this will have for sort of people and planet? And I think equally important, how do we make sure that it's deployed in a way where it doesn't cause bigger problems than it was meant to solve? And what I mean by that is, we kind of can't have, you know, ride hailing companies dumping 25,000 Robo taxis into Manhattan, and sort of, and we think that that's going to solve Manhattan traffic problems, it's only going to make them worse. So to me sort of the question mark, and the interesting thing is, how do we make sure that these public transportation systems are made better? And how the public transportation systems that we know today how do we get them to work in a close collaboration with these private operators of new mobility modes, which again, to me the absolute main piece of that is sort of Robo taxi fleets?

Jim Frazer  

I mean, let me ask you, Nikolai. You want while it sounds very rosy, there are some there's always the unintended consequence or consequences that do occur. And I think all of us probably have seen the, the extrapolations that if an autonomous shuttle bus or Robo taxis is so cost effective, that there may be a multitude of them circling your block in Manhattan, and you may have incredible amounts of traffic of empty vehicles just waiting to pick up the next passenger. Yeah. How do we eliminate or alleviate those kinds of complications?

Nikolaj Koster  

I think that's a great question. And I think first and foremost, if we look at how ride hill but even also sort of lately, micro mobility, specifically e scooters have been deployed, especially in the US, which has a much freer for all approach to business in general, right. It's been it's really been said about let's real roll into a city and then we'll sort of, well apologize later if the intention of how we roll out these systems, if it didn't work out is sort of intended. Whereas what we've seen in Europe with regards to rolling out the ride hail or micro mobility that has to be done in, in close collaboration with the legislators, the transit agencies, and so on, which then to my point, we can have your example. And that has to be legislated. So the same way that you and I, Jim, we can't just, you know, we wanted to start a new sort of airline type service, we wouldn't just be able to deploy 10, whatever type of planes up into the sky next Monday, that would this legislation around that. But we actually haven't had that in the transportation space on the ground, that's been a freefall. So I think it's very clear that a robot is operating a robo taxi in the city, whether it's in New York City in Manhattan, or anywhere else in the world is it has to be done on a sort of invitation basis. And it has to be in a way where whether you have two operators or five operators, that has to be done that that data has to be shared between them, it has to be aggregated on a level for the sort of master operating in the city, if you will, which is really the transit agency. And then you have to look at all the data to transit, the patterns, the occupation, as you were sort of saying the occupation rates, the dead mileage, how often are these, you know, pods of vehicles or shuttles? How often are they empty? Where did they go? Are they even allowed to roam around empty or do they have to pull away etc, etc.

Jim Frazer  

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. And I can even extrapolate further that it's not just a single fleet of homogenous, automated shuttles. But, you know, today if we look at some of the transportation scheduling services, where, you know, it shows us we could we could walk and then take a bus and go to light rail and maybe rent an Uber and get to a destination, it's only going to get more complex when the when the scooter, the autonomous shuttle, competing versions of autonomous shuttles are available. And many of these, these transportation management system platforms have access to different not only different modes of transportation but have different business cases. You know, somebody wants to sell you advertising, somebody wants to sell you coffee on the shuttle bus. It's going to be a very rich mix of options.

Nikolaj Koster  

Absolutely. You know, yeah, I wanted to comment on that for a second. So first of all, I think the future of mobility, how we solve transportation, both for folks living in cities, folks visiting cities, but also for the city, the livability of the city and the planet. And on an aggregate, we can't have first of all, we need all the modes, whatever that means that so differs between cities, but it's all the way from you know, sort of walking or the subway or the train or some type of vehicle moving back and forth with you on the in the backseat of the front seat, the right tool for the right job. But what we can't have individual operators only optimizing within a vacuum. So you can't have well, I'm missing can have I'm just saying like the ideal type of setup is that. So you know, again, take the example of Manhattan if you and I Jim was standing on where I used to live in Alphabet City, downtown. And we're on Avenue A and 13. You have right now a couple of ride hail companies operating in Manhattan. And we pull out an app with just one single app and we summon a vehicle. And then that comes, let's say the ETA for that is six minutes away. Maybe a competitor had a vehicle that was two minutes away, now we're dragging a car, and additional four minutes, right, that they wouldn't have to do. So I think I think for me the best the way that we have to do this, if we want to optimize for the city, not optimized for the operator who want to optimize for the city, the best possible traffic patterns, you kind of you start looking at something that's really sort of an aggregate way of operating these systems together, you kind of need to have one almost like a master API that everyone taps into. And I know this sort of goes against sort of the I guess, like the capitalists and the way that because they need to make money, right? They need to be distinct businesses and sort of optimize their own thing. But at the end of the day, if some of the bigger why's that we're trying to solve is not profitability for operators, but it's livability for folks that live in the city. It's the safety of the pedestrians, it's also the safety of the drivers on the streets, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's the way it probably needs to go.

Jim Frazer  

Yeah, I mean, taking one more step in that continuum is there will be vehicles that are not just people, transport, transportation vehicles, you know, your pizza will be arriving, right? A little a little thing or, and there'll be an awful lot of those. You know, as well, it'll be it certainly will be interesting. I do know that. For those that are concerned about the Big Brother and data collection aspects, that there are a number of initiatives out there in the world that are using Blockchain technologies, so that you as a transportation potential user, can anonymously broadcast your trip, your past trip history, along with your projected trip today. And different transportation providers could then bid on your trip today, knowing your past history. Absolutely gone this way. You know, maybe some approach like that would you make may gain traction to?

Nikolaj Koster  

Yeah, I think there is definitely some I love that. There's some nirvana of some type of marketplace, connecting tissue in the middle, you know, kind of hopefully, decentralized on the blockchain that allows everyone that wants to move or anything that wants to move. So it's either me or you or the pizza with all on the other side of the marketplace with all the participating modes, from feet to flight, if you will, which we call it and then the and then per mode, the amount of operators either public City or private, kind of probably the framework

Jim Frazer  

agreed? Well, that that's been a pretty good discussion on autonomous vehicles or on Robo taxis. But our title today is sustainability, transportation. And sure enough, autonomous vehicles play a role there. But it's larger than that. The first one that really comes to mind for me, and many is you know, pollution aspect of many transportation enhancements will be electrified and there will be less co2 emissions. And, you know, some of the unintended positive unintended consequences are if we have a conductive vehicle, even if it's a carbon event, you have to co2 emitting vehicle. And it is a connected vehicle that is communicating with a traffic signal, the traffic signal may stay green a little longer, and let that vehicle pass. So, so that there isn't a, you know, concentration of co2 right there at the corner where the pedestrians are, and it may, you know, may increase the gas mileage for that vehicle. So it's not really in my mind simply about electrification, but some of just a little smaller application of the legacy technology as well.

Nikolaj Koster  

I mean, I think you definitely have a point, I think the reason why I like we like talking about Robo taxi says that it puts a nice flag on the moon, it gives folks a really good sort of this is what success looks like, again, with the Asterix that this is deployed in a very sort of thoughtful way. Again, it can destroy traffic in cities as much as it can alleviate it. There that's just to give you a bit of a data point, you probably might have read the report OECD came out. It's a bunch of years ago. Now they did a set of simulation model on an average European city, but you can apply that across the world. average European city, by the way, is quite small. I think it's something like I can't remember 250,000 people or half a million maybe but it's less than a million people. And they said let's take the traffic sorry, the movement patterns of folks in the city. So how do they commute in? How do they commute out? And what did they do while they're in the city and on the weekends and so on? So that's the need of citizens in the city to move around? How do they do it right now? They largely do it in private owned vehicles. What if we deployed Robo taxis and shared Robo taxis meaning you're forced to sit next to someone you don't know, like you do in restaurants? If you deploy that, what would that new future state look like? And provided you preserve the existing public transportation infrastructure that's there already. And it turns out, you can remove 90% Of all the vehicles in the city. And you're left with 10%, which are now shuttles operated like Robo taxis, when you sort of split that out,

nine 90%. Who was calculated that OECD, so the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, they did the model in Lisbon in Portugal, that's fascinating? It is super fascinating. And so they have so you can find it on the internet, I can send it to you afterwards. And you can link to it in the description if you want to see it. So they basically commissioned this simulation to try to again play out how this would work. I think again, I think two key points in this is preserving existing well-functioning public transportation. This is in Lisbon, in Portugal, it's in Europe. So public transportation is pretty good. It also is not single passenger ride, so it's not Nicola Sturgeon going into a very large fancy black car. But in a robo taxi version, these are small shuttle bus type setups where were you know, three, four or five, it's basically in a high occupancy vehicle that operates at all times it's 24/7. Obviously, it never sleeps, you know, goes to charge quickly by itself, and then it comes back into the fleet. One of the other interesting data points was that with now no cars in the city, no private own cars in the city anymore. There's no need for parking. So this average city, you could remove a will or you basically free up what equates to about 200 soccer fields worth of parking that you can then convert into whatever you want, you know, the city could set to open that up for new sort of economic development. It could be for restaurants, cafes, businesses, you can do parks, you can do schools, whatever you kind of want there.

Jim Frazer  

Well, certainly, you know, one, one aspect of sustainability is quality of life. And, you know, I happen to live in the southeast, actually in South Florida and there are a number of legacy historical tourist type cities that you are beginning the process to ban cars from downtown and have no shell golf carts are currently they're driven by humans. But the long-term plan is to really have a, an out of the historic ring of the city, some depot where you can board that shuttle bus and ride your rod into the historical downtown district. And frankly, it doesn't, in fact, increase that quality of life. You know, another part of that of that human factor of quality of life is, is purely safety. And there still are a tremendous number of traffic accidents, fatalities and injuries and neglect data. We know they actually have been increasing, since we've had the impact of COVID. For a variety of reasons. Some of it is people are driving faster, because the roads are we're a little bit less cluttered with other cars. But the curious aspect is that actually have been rising. And as we all know, most of the great majority of accidents are happening because of driver human error, not because of the fault of the vehicle itself.

Nikolaj Koster  

Like, exactly, and some 94% of all car accidents happen because of human error. And, yeah, it's pretty fascinating. Again, we're talking about this future state where we were talking about this the flag on the moon still, right? It's that future state where humans don't have to drive anymore, I'm sure we'll want to drive once in a while, we'll want to bring up some old beautiful Corvette Stingray and go for a ride along Pacific Coast Highway. But if we think about transportation, as in 99%, of transportation is somewhat tedious. It's about commuting where we would love to do something else, whether it's watching a Netflix show or prepping for the meeting, right? It's how do we clean back that time? And how do we do it in a safe way. But I wanted to go back because you actually asked a really good question before, which was about sort of this robo taxi thing? It's something out in the future. And it's also a moving goalposts. It's the two main components of how we get there is technology that kind of just solves itself over time. And then it's the behavior can we sort of convinced me and my mom to go in that car? That's a slight question mark, maybe? And then it's obviously also just around the actual legislation on it. Like when will cities actually allowed us? But if we go back in time, so to the now and look at can we solve some of the sustainability problems are some of the other big problems with what we have right now? And, and that I think is interesting. And that sort of it pertains to some of the stuff that we're doing here at Diem. So what I mentioned in the beginning, is that, to me, to us, one of the largest problems we have in the world right now with transportation is that, again, 80% of all my miles traveled is more than that, by the way in the US, but done in private cars, how can we give folks an alternative to private costs? Now, we can't do that always, most people will still want to own a vehicle. But for some of their commutes, some of their business trips, some of the leisure trips, are there more efficient, that could be cost efficient ways and more sustainable ways that we can do give to them? And the answer, obviously, is that we're seeing electrification of private vehicles right now. So that's accelerating pretty fast, which is really great to see. One of the, one of the things that we see is, there's obviously, it's still expensive to buy an electric vehicle, there's still a lot of misconceptions around electric vehicles, you know, ranging society, that kind of stuff, right? If you don't have to own the vehicle, but you just have access to it. That's the sort of the whole concept around mobility as a service, then you don't have to worry about range anxiety. And that's obviously rental cars, right? You don't own them, you just get them and then you go kind of from A to B and then that's it, you pick it up, it's the truck, it's full, but it's fully charged. And you know, there's a routing on it shows you where to charge and two days later, you drop it, and hopefully you have a good experience. Same thing, if you look at ride Hill, one of the interesting things that Uber has done, which and we work with Uber on this is a they have a sort of a product, which is a green version of their ride, hail, so of use of, if you click that, that button on the right Hill app, you will get a hybrid or an electric vehicle. So I know a hybrid is still a gas engine with a tiny little battery on top. It's really just a gas engine, slightly better gas engine. But it's still it's still it's still better and real electric costs of mixed in there really, I think cool thing is that they now have price parity. So it basically means that you can book an Uber green for the same cost as if you're booking a fully petrol Howard and ice Hoover. And now even in some cities, they have pure EV categories. So pick that and then you'll be, you know, Tesla Model three or four marquee or something like that a post or two will come and pick you up. So basically that sustainability choice you can immediately make, and just to tie a bow around that whole thing, the reason so we, the company I work for we do corporate travel, so our customers have fortune 500 companies, and, you know, they have anything, anywhere from a couple of 1000 employees up to you know, hundreds of 1000s of employees. And when I think about the impact that we can have, it's obviously if we can give these companies an interface, an app, a website, when they travel around the world. And they have to make the decision of going from A to B, from hotel to airport, if we can nudge them over to a sustainable option, right. So when electric rental car or light rail or an electric goober for instance, instead of the equivalent sort of gas, non sustainable mode of transportation, we immediately impact a lot of employees. And we do it in the in the space of mobility as a service as in, you do not as a family have to go out and purchase this mode. You just have access to it that I think is really interesting.

Jim Frazer  

Yeah, that certainly is, you know, I'm reminded that in our work, you're in a RC we're often looking at, you know, when is the inflection point on vehicle, personal passenger vehicle electrification. And we know it's not terribly far off when the cost of the electric vehicle cost per mile, total cost of ownership is actually below that of an internal combustion engine vehicle. And arguably, we may be at that point, but the general market hasn't may have not perceived that. You know, in some applications, we're certainly there. There, there are some jurisdictions in the US, and I do have Tesla police cars, because they see the cost per mile.

Nikolaj Koster  

I've seen that it's fascinating, isn't it? Yeah,

Jim Frazer  

it really is. But I'm wondering, and I've been interested in perplexed a bit by your, by your comment, that there's a swiftly changing culture around travel. Can you expand upon that a little bit?

Nikolaj Koster  

Sorry, what do you mean, my comment around travel? What specifically?

Jim Frazer  

Yes, it's about you've commented that there's a swiftly changing culture around travel. Is that being that people traveling more? Being more comfortable with different modes?

Nikolaj Koster  

No, I think, I think my point is that we, we, as a booking platform work, we're gateways to modes of mobility. We're an interface where mid layer for corporate travelers to two different modes of mobility, and about a third of all traveling the world is business travel, and business travelers are there less. There is sort of, because you're not traveling on your own dime. You use, you sometimes then have sort of more modes, more options for you, right. So we just think that there is, to me the most important thing when I sort of wake up in the morning around the toe mobility space in game, it's how do we move the needle the most? And I think there is an opportunity to change the behavior of a lot of folks by giving them both more convenient modes, but really more sustainable modes.

Jim Frazer  

No, I agree. I agree. And it's not all about autonomous or even vehicle electrification. You know, one technology that I'm quite enthused by, is simply connected vehicle technology. 802 11 P for those geeks out there. And it's 100-meter Point to Point Protocol with very low latency, so that well basically in layman's terms, each vehicle cannot occupy someone else's location, their GPS base. That protocol is already in phone in your in your phones. Now it hasn't been turned on. But this way, even ice vehicles can aggregate as a little fleet going down the road and can talk to that traffic signal and turn it green where the traffic signal Lord alternately can say you're a little bit too far away. Let me take over and take your foot off the accelerator pedal and you can just call was in at an echo rate. And they even have a terminology there for those ice vehicles as they call it echo drive, if there if there is that that dynamic interaction between the traffic signal and the and the ice vehicle, but more importantly, and also it also drives that quality of life and safety issue for the pedestrian where your car will know, in the relatively near future maybe before autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous that you are in the crosswalk, and that vehicle will not will not allow itself to impact you.

Nikolaj Koster  

Right, right. I mean, yeah, you will. Again, it's back to this thing of it's obviously, you know, your podcast, it's a smart city, smart Road, smart crosswalk. There is a world in the future where we probably will want all of these vehicles in some shape or form to communicate together. And I mean, it's interesting, I was driving back from LA to San Francisco last night and took a bit of a detour off the Pacific coast, it took a very long time. But it is fascinating. Driving on a six lane, five lane, four lane, whatever it is, highway, and look how efficiently the humans operate those highway systems, right? So it is, it's a complete freefall, whether or not someone is on the left side, the right side, it's completely random, who's going five miles faster, five miles slower, and the amount of space, these humans inside of the vehicles that are take up on these highways is just phenomenal. And when you start getting to a world where we can, and again, Robo taxis are not, but at least we can have these sorts of vehicles start talking to each other. And as you said, either roll through about say red lights, you can remove the red lights, or you can sequence the red light based on traffic flows, etc. You can start having both safer, but also way more efficient flows of traffic.

Jim Frazer  

No purely from a from a financial standpoint, the user, you know, the well, new vehicle today in the US is I think the average price is $40,000.

Nikolaj Koster  

It's going up quickly, by the way, but yeah, you're right. Yeah,

Jim Frazer  

and the if you're going to get one, and the utilization rate is very low. I mean, that's when you really think about it for those that don't work at home. That's, that's a very pricey asset that sit in your driveway or in your garage or in your condominium parking lot.

Nikolaj Koster  

It is. And that's it, you're hitting the nail on the head. The problem is there's no alternative. It's coming. But it's very difficult to find an alternative. So the cars parts on average, in the world, these 1.4 billion cars to park you know these numbers, right, it's 95% of the time they sit still, when they drive, they have you and then half a passenger, so average occupancy in privately owned vehicles at 1.5. It really is ridiculous. And then when the driving on the road, it's about humans who are not the best at driving, right? So there's, there's so much there's so much to gain by improving that. But the problem right now, obviously, is that we have to have these cars, because we really only if you live in big cities that have really great subway systems, or you know, where sort of the cost of the ride Hill, for instance, is very, very low and the reliability of them are very high, then you have a true alternative. But if you sort of model it up, if you look at the cost per mile for a ride hill or say a taxi, they're not too far from each other, and then map that up against sort of your the cost per mile for private car ownership, even if that car sits still most of the time, that that sort of Dolman Toyota Camry out in the garage is still a heck of a lot cheaper than doing ride hail, which is why you can rely on an average family can't do ride Hill as their commute, right? They can't do it for shopping and can't do it for weekends and so on. So that that's really that's why we keep talking about again, that flag on the moon, the robo taxi stuff when we sort of can, when you remove the human driver and you hopefully with some kind of legislation, say in order for these vehicles or pods or shuttles to operate in the city, they have to be shared, we have to have two or three people sitting in them. When you get to that point, you drop the price per mile for Robo shuttle down to the cost of public transportation. And that's the inflection point that's when everything changes.

Jim Frazer  

You know Nicola, let me ask you an uncomfortable inconvenient question perhaps is that you know, public transportation in the US is heavily subsidized. Do you see the same scenario having to play out for what arguably are probably will be privately owned shuttle systems?

Nikolaj Koster  

So I think the way you probably have to do this is at some point you want to and you see this in Europe, in some cities, you want to start carving out car free zones in cities. So you already have congestion charge rates or cost something to drive in the city. That's a way of obviously limiting the number of miles driven by private on cars in cities. And then at something the next level after that is that you basically shut off part of the inner city, but folks still need to be able to move around. So what's the alternative? There's no alternative right now, because public transportation is just not convenient enough. It's on a fixed route, it's on a fixed schedule that doesn't really fit your route and your schedule. But when you move into that Robo taxi future, it's you know, it’s completely dynamically routed, and is completely on demand. But what happens if you if you sort of can't afford it, right? If you rely on that sort of very cheap, $1,000 car to take you to and from work, which a lot of people do, that's when you need to move into something that's subsidized. So I think to your point, that's probably what you want to do, you probably for a certain income level, you probably want to subsidize access to public transportation. And I want to call it quasi or hybrid public transportation, which is what I would view Robo taxis having to be in the future. And then other people will have higher income, say, oh, they'll pay, they'll pay the full price.

Jim Frazer  

Okay, well, that leads to somewhat of a broader question is, you know, private versus public mobility as a service. Yeah. Is that you see it just being an issue of subsidization for lower income strata? Or are there other creative combinations there that might result?

Nikolaj Koster  

Well, I think, so I think one important thing, probably, that you and I can agree on is that, again, Robo taxis are not the solution to everything, Robo taxis are probably the solution to getting rid of car ownership. And when I say get rid of maybe some folks will be like, but I want to own my car. And you know, that's probably fine. But you probably don't want to because it's going to be so much cheaper, so much safer for your children. You can work from the from the car, and so on, or from the shuttle, that you probably want to do that just out of sheer, again, economic sense, or safety and so on. But if you look at the public transportation system, so whether it's fast rail, whether it's subway, etc. When done right, those modes are so much more efficient in moving large amounts of people back and forth in a city. So those these two, it's not an either or, it's definitely a sense of, we still want and need to have public transportation system, we still need to improve them. But we'll probably have this future where they will be very much collaborating with the with an almost like a per inmate basis, the private operators. And to your point, again, public transportation is subsidized. To some extent, we probably want to look at potentially, if we're telling people, you can drive your car in this five-by-five-mile square anymore in the city. We are and if we need to, if we want to make sure that we have social mobility as in everyone can actually go back and forth that kind of like democratization of mobility. We have to look at subsidizing or moving some of the subsidizing off of into these kind of hybrid quasi Robo public networks.

Jim Frazer  

Well, sir, certainly because in the me today, we have instances where Lyft and Uber are actually the contracted providers for last month, first mile and last mile service to light rail stations and yeah, and suburban state and train stations that might go to an Inner City as well. That's already happening.

Nikolaj Koster  

Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. Because right now, it's, it's even more apparent in in, in Europe, you have public transit agencies that are trying to or that need to serve communities where the traffic patterns are very light, she basically have buses, where you can have 20 or 30 people sitting in and you have one or two people in them, which is you know, they're just huge. Some of the routes are a huge loss for them. And to your point, they're doing a dynamic routed on demand type system, in collaboration with an Uber or Lyft can make a lot more financial sense and it can actually be a better experience for the actual traveler as well.

Jim Frazer  

Certainly here in North America, particularly in the US, it's the first mile last mile problem that gets an awful lot of attention. How do I get my inch? Well, typically has been my private car to the train station. And there, there are no parking spaces for me. Yeah. Yeah. Typically, that's, that's what you see. Well, that leads me to another question that I think you've spoken about the past, which is no micro mobility, rather than just autonomous mobility. But how does that help cities?

Nikolaj Koster  

I mean, from a from a footprint standpoint, I don't know how many of the listeners, but you can maybe you can use Google while you're while you're listening. Right now, if you Google footprint of a bus versus footprint of a car, you a lot of a lot of the sort of different blocks have done these pictures of you take 100 People 200 People, and you show that the amount of area they take up, if they're just on pathways, they're just walking, then they have the same picture of them on the bike. And then they have the same picture of them in a bus, and then the same picture of them in a car, you just see how that geographical footprint just shoots up as we start moving into the cars. So you know, I as I mentioned in the beginning, I'm you know, I come from a biking country, I'm an avid biker here in San Francisco as well. But there are definitely certain areas I don't bike or there are definitely certain areas where I don't take an E scooter because, you know, I, I, I want to I want to survive the day. So, you know, it's, if you've ever tried to bike in downtown Manhattan, then you sort of see the bike lanes there, which, and I'm trying to do the air quotes with bike lanes, because it's literally, you pick it, you painted the picture of a bike lane on a road, but you still have a four lane Avenue with SUVs, going 50 miles an hour, you don't want to ride your bike next to that. So it's super-efficient moving in a city, depending on what city it is, obviously. But it can be very efficient moving by foot or by bike, ebike e scooter, all those kind of micro mobility options, but the city in itself needs to be just needs to facilitate that right, it needs to be safe for that.

Jim Frazer  

The density you're you brought to mind for me an application that Google may be, you may be able to find this. But going back to my connected vehicle technology application, I know there is a study out there of if you were to use connected vehicle technology on the buses going through the Lincoln Tunnel over to the Port Authority Bus Station in Manhattan. And they were able to travel five feet of heart rather than hundreds of feet apart as they currently do in that bus lane, you would quit well in the Port Authority Bus Station with customers. And the hurdle would then be how to circulate the buses around downtown Manhattan back out back out the Lincoln or Holland Tunnel. Yeah. Yeah, it's, um, it's going to be an interesting world moving forward.

Nikolaj Koster  

It is it is. And I will say I, you know, I think about that, when I see American citizen, most American cities are they're very much built for the car. So I think as we think about micro mobility in sort of a US context versus other cities, it's really about, to your point, Jim, the density of the city. So we're, it's, it's this balance between what's the convenience, you still need, you still want to get from A to B as fast as you possibly can. That's the convenience factor, right. But then at the same time, you also want to do it in a way where it's sort of, it's not optimizing for you, you and just yourself, you're not just an island in that city, right, you want to optimize for the entire city. So we don't have a CD of eight and a half million people trying to get from A to B in the same piece of metal, which happens to be a car, and nobody wins, right. So depending on what kind of CD is what the what the density of the city is, and so on, you can basically sort of think of multimodal mobility from feet to flight, you know, the cars in the middle of the Micromobility in the middle, in the middle of the subways, the buses, the trains, and so on as different types of tools for the job. And if we can find a way for that to be operated in a more sort of in a way where it doesn't optimize for individuals or private companies profit but it optimizes for all of our convenience, all of our safety and the livability of the city. This is probably the way to

Jim Frazer  

go. Yeah, I mean, I mean, if you were to ask me about the future, I do see a scenario clearly the modes of transportation will only continue to increase and the options of how you select that will increase and you may you may purchase by speed by reduction of co2 emissions or maybe taking the scenic route, there may be a number of sliders there on your on your options. And I would expect it wouldn't be just one data provider that you that you may go to,

Nikolaj Koster  

do you think do you think at some point we'll see the first cities almost doing a? I don't even know what we'd call it. But some almost like a co2 sustainability quota that kind of says, Jim, you've traveled too much and too many big cars this month, you're out of credit. So it's, it's E scooters and walking and electric vehicles from here. Do you think like, we'll get to a point where we'll kind of have City's transit agencies interfering, if you want to call it that that much, or trying to at least sort of nudge legislates around what the behavior in the city?

Jim Frazer  

That's a million-dollar question. I'm reminded of a recent a world economic foundation forum presentation where they asked about ESG rating and how many there are particular about how, you know, Tesla was not on the S&P 500 any longer. ESG S&P 500? And the common I forget who the CEO was, but it was a consumer goods manufacturer. And he said, don’t worry, Elon Musk, there's only 14 Major ESG rating agencies out there. And they all weigh all the different aspects very differently. So it really depends on the weighting, though the weighting in say, you know, San Jose, or San Francisco is probably going to be different than it is in Houston, Texas.

Nikolaj Koster  

I mean, I guess to some, some extent, just answered my own question. I didn't know how to answer by the way. That's why I was trying to ask you, but I guess like, I guess cities, I mean, cities are already interfering, right. And I mean, when I say interfering, I actually mean that in a positive way. But if you look at street closures, right, you know, shutting down streets doing pedestrian walkways, and that kind of stuff. There's a lot going on in Barcelona, in Spain, right now in Paris, in France, Oslo, Norway, a bunch of European cities, whether they're basically shutting down the roads for, for vehicle traffic and turning them into these, I think, really cool, green, walkable areas. And so the neighborhoods are not this, oh, I'm walking out on the street. And I immediately have to watch for cars and the sound and the, you know, the smell and all that stuff, but it's literally green walkways instead, which I think is pretty incredible.

Jim Frazer  

You're absolutely right. You know, they're we're all well aware that many, many cities have been very challenged by tourism, and in particular cars, and they're doing a much better job of, of managing that, whether it be Amsterdam, or Venice, or even here, Ryman, Florida, St. Augustine, or Key West, you know, that that tourism aspect. And the transportation that requirements that come along with it are often a heavy lift, particularly as business interests, attempt to continue the growth of that industry in a particular domain that might be a bit delicate and small for that matter.

Nikolaj Koster  

Yeah, I just want to I don't want this to be a sales pitch, obviously. So I'll try to undersell it. But I think that's one of the things we think about, and again, in our world of business travel. You know, we I think as to your point, you know, in your locality where you live, Jim, like, what's a good way of traveling around? And I know, here in San Francisco, like what are good ways to travel around and I know what I can walk to I know where I can take sort of, you know, the bar to I know when I need to take my vehicle and so on, but when we travel, so if you go to Berlin, in Germany, and I try to tell you to ask you like what's the best way to get from Tia garden, which is their big park in the middle of the city and then out to Schoenfeld airport. Like, what's the best way of doing that much drive time? You need to make the flight at 1pm? Like you probably don't know that, right. I mean, I don't know that. So I think if we can, once again, one thing is the local community travel that we need to solve, but one of the things that we think about is business travelers as they travel around and travel to new cities in the US or outside of the US, how can we help them make better choices and when I say better choices, it's really about not just cost control, because you know, they have Travel Manager wanting to make sure they don't run out of budget, but it's really about this sustainability piece. How can we get them into light rail instead of a car how can if they need a car? How can we help them get an electric car? You know, instead of instead of a gas a gas car, or how can we maybe make sure they don't need to drive and then park but that, you know, they can do a rental car combined with a ride Hill, whatever it might be. So that that's very much how we, you know, we think about multimodal mobility when people travel and also this sort of this notion of virtual interlining, which is, when you combine different modes, it's what you mentioned earlier as well, the first mile last mile, right? So you walk to the subway, and you take the subway somewhere else, and then you might get on a plane. That's three modes that are virtually and slammed together. You're doing that right now in your head. So that's your little tech computer that sort of stitches it together. But it's kind of wouldn't it be nice if you're in Shanghai that you had some kind of app, app thing that told you this is the best way to virtual things line your trip? When accounting for safety, time cost and sustainability? For instance,

Jim Frazer  

you beat me to that question; I was going to ask you about the other attributes beyond sustainability in our travel planning platform. And of course, you know, one of the most troublesome ones is predictability. Particularly when it's not your own car, you know, one of the main reasons a driver out cars, I know when I'm going to going to get there.

Nikolaj Koster  

Yeah, that's I mean, that's a good point. And, yeah, one of the things we're looking at right now is, again, we're business travel platform, and as such we typically have travelers are not typically, we have travelers booking their flights and their hotels in this platform. That's a those are geo locations, right. So that means we have an airport in the beginning and an airport in the end. And then we have a hotel in the middle. And then the technology that prediction can actually basically compute that entire journey for you and saying, well, we know home address, departure airport, destination airport hotel in the middle, and then vice versa, that they're the reverse right going back. Let's try to just compute that. So you basically have to your point, a bunch of attributes, time costs, sustainability, convenient safety anymore. And then you can almost look at them as like little levers you could sort of pull up now and say I really want to skew this all the way over in sustainability. And I have a lot of time so don't worry about how quickly this happens. And then give me the best possible route but you could also flip it around right and say I need to get there as fast as possible. And home as fast as possible to my family. Show me what the best options are virtual interlining does for me,

Jim Frazer  

physically that really is fascinating. And I and I have to tell you that this has been an intriguing almost an hour speaking with again, Nikolai Costa of Diem, head of mobility at Diem a travel plan platform. Nikolai other any last comments you have for our audience as we're nearing the end of our episode today.

Nikolaj Koster  

I just want to say that if you're not driving an electric vehicle right now, I think, go, go try. I'm sure you have a friend or friend of a friend who has an electric vehicle, go out and try them. I'm still fascinated by how far we've come the last couple of years with electric vehicles I drove our own electric vehicle again from LA to San Francisco yesterday. And such an enjoyable experience. I'm just I'm just I'm happy I'm just I'm such a technology person that you've technology person. I'm just happy we have this tech under our feet right now. And back to your point earlier about the price parity and if you're in the market for vehicle that's anything above 40 40,000 Something like that there's no reason not to take an electric vehicle today if you look at total cost of ownership, especially with gas prices going up if you're under that maybe have a look at the used car Evie market you probably have to wait a bit for it, but it to me that makes me happy. That's kind of like the first order of business in this future mobility is let's try to get these 1.4 billion cars electrified as quickly as possible. I think that we're seeing some pretty good steps on that, and the market gets great.

Jim Frazer  

Your Nicola I'll even expand upon that a little bit more. I mean, I'm here in South Florida with you know, warm weather and you know, we don't have rainstorms for days on end at any rate, but we do see a profusion of electric golf carts and particularly electric bicycles for and people, you know, go to the supermarket half a mile away or two miles away, and no, that's what they'll use.

Nikolaj Koster  

That's awesome. That's why we don't I mean, there are obviously ebike companies as well. But to your point, like even also, you know, sort of privately owned e bikes, the bikes are really great these days. Good low price point, and they go really far they're easy to charge. That is a good mode of mobility.

Jim Frazer  

Yeah, I mean, I'll leave with it with an anecdote that my nephew had a f 250 superduty sold it and he for a job and he sold them an E bike and at a discount to the bike and he loves his ebike

Nikolaj Koster  

Wow gives him give him my regards. I love that.

Jim Frazer  

Yeah. And he doesn't have to pay for parking because he could ride it right into the store.

Nikolaj Koster  

Well again, I'm sure he paid like I'm sure he paid for two parking spots before.

Jim Frazer  

Exactly, exactly. Well Nikolai this is this has been fascinating truly, truly fascinating on Lastly, if someone wants to reach out to you, can you give us some of your contact information?

Nikolaj Koster  

Um, yeah, I am on I'm obviously on LinkedIn. So if you look me up on LinkedIn or obviously also feel free to shoot me an email. If you're dropping that in the description, folks are very welcome to reach out to me. I'd love to chat. Right.

Jim Frazer  

Right. Well, well, once again, our guest today has been Nikolaj Koster, head of mobility at DEEM travel planning platform. Thank you to everyone who's been listening in today.

Nikolaj Koster  

Take care. Thanks for having me. Jim. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

vehicle, mobility, transportation, car, city, public transportation, cities, robo, sustainability, taxis, mile, point, travel, world, people, modes, nikolai, drive, ride, electric vehicle

SPEAKERS

Jim Frazer, Nikolaj Koster, ARC Advisory Introduction