Transportation or mobility
By: J. David Chapman/November 11, 2021
My city conducts surveys to identify the biggest concerns to citizens. The results of every survey show traffic as the number one concern in our community. In response, our planning department held a “mobility fair” last week. The program was excellent and the citizens that took the time to participate certainly left the program energized and educated to find solutions.
It occurred to me that our citizens might not understand the verbiage we use in the planning and development world and might be confused by the term “mobility.” There has been a shift in the language used to describe the movement of people. Depending on your age, where you live, and in what industry you work, mobility may draw to mind something your grandfather rides around on, a socioeconomic opportunity, or a ride to be accessed through your smartphone.
In the U.S., people are likely to use the word “transportation” to describe people and goods moving around and mobility to describe electronic scooters for the elderly or relating to social aspiration. Recently, however, the word “transportation” is being replaced with “mobility.”
Transportation is the act of moving goods and services. Mobility is the ability to freely move or be moved. The important difference here is the word “ability.” Transportation (across-carry in Latin) describes the act of moving something or someone, whereas mobility (capable of movement) describes the ability of a person to move or be moved. In other words, transportation is something you do and mobility is something you have.
To understand the change in words, you must understand the shift in economics. Many of the world’s most profitable companies don’t simply sell things, they provide access to them. They do so with technology moving from vertically integrated value chains to laterally scaled digital platform models where subscription and access models are the norm.
In transportation, we have entered a mobility-as-a-service or MaaS; the shift from personal ownership of vehicles to the use of “mobility solutions” as services. Did you catch it? There it was, the reason why people are now saying mobility. As the digital revolution matures and more people use the technology, the public is beginning to use this word because it reflects how they are moving around. The term mobility eases itself into sentences (and minds), that denotes “access to” rather than “ownership of.”
J. David Chapman is professor of finance and real estate at the University of Central Oklahoma (jchapman7@uco.edu).