Technology and population shift demand change
By the end of this century, conservative estimates of population growth mean we will add about another 3 billion people to the planet. Add to this the fact that city population will increase from 11% of total population to about 23%.
The Old Guard won't cut it
It’s then not hard to see why the traditional technology of rail, road, air, and sea transport networks is being forced to become more technology defined to keep pace with growing populations in cities, requiring increasingly more mobility.
Consumers now expect a largely seamless, app driven, delivery on transport options. Take cities like Munich where from one app, you can configure one trip consisting of bike, public transport, city car hire and Uber taxi. And this is only the starting point.
Car ownership a thing of the past
Fast forward 10 years when autonomous vehicles will roam the streets collecting and dropping off passengers, massively reducing the need for individual car ownership and in turn congestion and time wasted.
The benefits to the consumers are clear, the challenges faced by the transit networks are immense. Reliability and Safety of service is paramount, as is accessibility and security of networks when you introduce technology being (quite literally) the driving force of vehicles.
There are a number of constants within this scenario. One key aspect is constant availability. Whether this be from the point of view of a network that has redundancy and can be easy to monitor diagnose and fix, through to the power protection of Uninterruptable Power Supplies for all the technology providing the service.
VARs have a bigger than ever opportunity to become part of the transformation conversation with transport networks.