The world of transportation is changing. Or, maybe, it’s better to say that the world has changed. The ground has shifted and it’s not shifting back.
“The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.”
– Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash
Some facts:
- The most valuable car company in the world is a company that only makes electric cars.
- At least one person has been killed by a “self-driving taxi.”
- The richest people in the world are in a race to put themselves and some rich friends into space.
- America’s political leader is a person who loves trains and managed to pass a $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill that includes a large investment in rail.
- Cities have been overrun by eager, heavily capitalized scooter and bike companies.
Any of these facts would seem laughable just 20 years ago. Taken together they still feel absurd. There have been attempts to understand this world with terms like “micro-mobility” and “shared mobility, “ but the common thread in this new lexicon for a new transportation age is less what’s explained than the massive amount that isn’t.
What the hell is micro-mobility, anyway?
This new world needs a new kind of journalism. There’s plenty of great reporting on the various pieces of the mobility world, but no single place that seems to bring the disparate pieces together and considers them in the context of one another.
That’s what Motive Future wants to be. As our name suggests, we’re curious about the future of movement and how all of this is going to work.
Our plan is to be as experimental in our coverage of new mobility solutions as the mobility solutions themselves with an emphasis on video and audio. To wit, please follow us on TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram.
What are we going to cover? Cities. Infrastructure. Trains. Bikes. Driverless cars. Hydrofoils. Drones. SpaceX. Scooters. Anything that’s meant to move people and/or goods beyond that isn’t a traditional automobile (there are plenty of great outlets covering those).
Why? History is our best guide and history teaches that if you don’t think about how you shape your transportation it shapes you and often not for the better.
A more just and more sustainable world is as attainable as a dirtier and unfairer one. The choice is ours until it isn’t.
We want to inform so that, collectively, we can make better choices.
Also, we like scooters.
