Reprogramming Mobility: The Digital Transformation of Transportation in the United States

In this report, we present a set of four alternative scenarios set in major American metropolitan areas in the year 2030. We intend that these scenarios can be used to spur and inform discussions about the key issues that the nation’s transportation planners and policymakers need to anticipate in the coming decade. And we craft the alternative futures by using the approach of four archetypes: growth, collapse, constraint and transformation.

By 2014 mobile carriers have spent over $500 billion building out the nation’s cellular communications grid – about the same cost of the Interstates. All but invisible to planners and citizens alike, this new communications network is the most important transportation infrastructure of our era, enabling us to re-invent the how our roads, transit systems, and freight and logistics networks function. We call this process re-programming mobility.

In lieu of large civil infrastructure projects, transportation systems are increasingly being augmented with a range of information technologies that make them smarter, safer, more efficient, more integrated.