Denis Opudo
The world transport sector is highly undergoing revolutions. Therefore, South Africa and Africa continent should work out ways on how to embrace the rapid revolution. It calls for government, academia, and industry to come together and place the continent on the same level with other regions. The 3rd Future Mobility Roundtable is working on achieving that. The forum is an initiative of The Mobility Centre for Africa NPC (MCA). The forum was held in Cape Town on 13th February 2018.
South Africa is one of the few tech-savvy nations in the continent. However, the country needs a good policy to manage the transport disruptive forces. It also needs a good legislative environment to achieve that. The government also has a huge role to play. In the 3rd Future Mobility Roundtable, Uber was an official partner of MCA. However, the work towards the transport changes started in 2009. It worked towards getting transport at one’s comfort. Since then Uber has operated for a period of eight years covering more than two billion trips. The company now works on solving more challenging issues on transport. One of the challenges included reducing pollution and congestion in the cities. This was to be achieved by having fewer cars to transport many people.
The 1st Future Mobility Roundtable took place at Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban on 5th October 2017. During the event, MCA promised to carry out research testing and deployment of future Smart Mobility Solutions. This also included electric, autonomous and connected vehicle technology. The 2nd Future Mobility Roundtable took place at the IDC Conference Centre on Sandton on 23rd November 2017. It also brought together mobility and transport experts. The group had knowledge about future of mobility in Africa.
The 3rd Future Mobility Roundtable discussed the policy and legislative framework. The two are important for the development of the new mobility solutions. MCA Executive Director opened the conference. He also talked about the world trends in the future. The future focused on the Shared and Electric (CASE) Mobility, Connected and Autonomous. The Road Infrastructure and Industry Development at the National Department of Transport CEO gave a keynote. There was also the Consular General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Antoine Aubert and Yolisa Kan who work with Uber talked about the Regulatory Reform for Effective Shared Mobility.
The talk on 2018 Future Mobility Trend was delivered by Ivan Reutener. Ivan is a Smart Mobility Expert at the Mobility Centre for Africa. The Technical Director at Urban and Regional Planning at Aurecon talked about Planning Policies for the New Ecosystem. Royal HaskoningDHV Netherlands Smart Mobility Specialist represented the Global Legislative Responses to Emerging Mobility
