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These days, browsing through any transit agency site will tell you one basic truth: everything is changing quickly. Two weeks ago, agencies began posting notices about increased sanitation measures, and a week later there was a deluge of announcements: service changes, more service changes, backdoor boarding, no fares, and more. And when this is over (and I believe coronavirus will be over), these same service changes will need to be reversed gradually, creating more flux.

Public transit has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in cities around the world. While the impact has been extensive – ridership has declined as much as 90% for some services — the radically altered position of public transit goes beyond economics; it actually turns some of our core beliefs about transit on their heads.

Mobility as a Service, better known as MaaS, for all its four-words-made-into-one, is actually not one service or one application. Full blown MaaS will be made of several distinct and separate moving parts and in its wake, the technology driving today’s transportation providers will morph into something entirely different. But before we go there, let’s discuss what MaaS is.

Movement in and between cities is being reduced around the world in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving public transit agencies to figure out how best to provide transit service while minimizing the spread of the virus and contending with expected drops in ridership and driver availability.

For travelers, it is unnecessarily complicated to move around cities. Every urban area uses specific systems, applications, and customer interfaces. An overarching mobility platform, including urban mobility and travel products, is a feasible solution. It is also a chance for innovative mobility providers to catch intercity travelers as new customers. We interviewed three startups that…

Corporate commuter shuttles have specific challenges other transit operations may not have to face, as we found out when improving the efficiency of commuter shuttle operations in Silicon Valley. These shuttles are provided by large companies

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of life so quickly and seamlessly that many of us are still unaware of how deeply it has impacted society. AI analytics has increased the productivity and efficiency of a range of industries ranging from manufacturing to retail.

Five years ago, Government Technology saw something happening: Civic tech was changing. Fueled by new technologies, modern methodologies and a sudden interest from investors, startups were beginning to work more with government. In a space long dominated by incumbents, notorious for complex procurement and implementation cycles, agencies were hungering for something new.

Since September, commuters using Shanghai’s Number 9 bus route have had a new way of catching a ride. Rather than stand at a designated stop, they open a smartphone app and book a ride to wherever they’re going. The service, provided by Alibaba, takes those reservations into account and calculates where the bus should go, using the company’s…

The mobility space is on the move; in recent years it has been changing at a far quicker pace than in the past several decades. Many interesting things are happening on multiple fronts — cities are debating how to accommodate new forms of mobility and their impact, how to better manage street and curb space, and whether and what they should regulate.