The Future of Transportation Will Focus on the Masses, Not the Individual

It used to be, part of the American dream involved being handed the keys to a car on your sixteenth birthday. You were of age, after all; you'd earned it. And a car  – be it a new Beamer or a dilapidated beater – was the ultimate symbol of adult freedom. With white knuckles, parents would watch as their babies backed out of driveways, praying for a safe and timely return. But now? Yeah, now not so much. Young people continue to flock to cities, in no small part because cities will always innovate faster than the 'burbs. Cities are also expensive. And congested. This is what public transit was built for. It's no coincidence that finding a habitable apartment near a MBTA stop is basically impossible. So even amid delays and higher prices for admission, people – and especially young people, or the so-called millennials – are shunning car ownership increasingly in favor of more efficient and cost-effective alternatives. I myself haven't owned a car in almost five years. And I love cars. Like, drool over them on the daily. But from living in Chicago to San Francisco to Boston, a train or a bike just continues to make so much more sense. So, the question emerges: Are we on the brink of a shift from personal transportation to mass transit? It's a loaded question, with lots of nuance and tangents and potential answers. Which is exactly why we posed it to our transportation panel for the forthcoming State of Innovation Forum, taking place June 12, including:

And wouldn't you know? Their positions on the matter ranged from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" and everywhere in between. I'm not going to say who said what, but it's proof-positive the panel discussion promises to be a lively one. I'll be moderating, which will essentially entail pointing at people far smarter than I when it's their turn to speak. It should be a lot of fun. It's a fascinating topic, this question of the economy around moving one person at a time versus many. And it really couldn't come at a more appropriate time. Urban bike ridership is blossoming at the same time driverless cars are legitimately not the stuff of Sy-Fy anymore. Similarly, Boston, for its part, is an apt  backdrop for such a debate. Here, a pop-up, self-iterating bus service is disrupting an age-old industry at the same time Uber continues to rub the Taxi business the wrong way. The push to accommodate more people via public transit has even taken to the seas. To wit, it's not unfathomable for a recently anointed teen to have a set of car keys dangled before their eyes only to shrug and wonder, What's the point?  There's far more to be said on this topic, and that's just one of the prodding questions we'll be discussing at Thursday's State of Innovation. If you want to be in the room – and really, public transit affects us all – snag yourself a ticket below. Bonus: First 25 people to use code BSOITRANSPO will score 50 percent off.

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