It is almost impossible to keep up with advances in transportation. As you can see, research abounds in everything from bringing app-ordered car services to rural areas to investing in green bus lines, bullet trains and using artificial intelligence designing bus routes.
In larger cities, app-ordered cars are changing the way we live. A decade ago, one could only consider living car-free in about ten US cities. Now, with services like Uber and Lyft, we have options. We don’t lack for research on how to design cities that get children and adults to school and work seamlessly on public transportation. In the quest to create a family-friendly city, we need to invite the following people into a room to brainstorm: city planners and reps from bus line companies, bus route departments, app-ordered car companies and the state department of transportation who oversee roads and trains.
Currently, even with advances in transport, our fifty unique states exist in a pretty car-centric nation. This can mean for children, teens, rural folks or those on limited incomes, extreme difficulty going to the grocery store or work or to recreation. While many urban transit systems run like tops, others are very inefficient. In rural communities public transport services range from minimal to non-existent.
Teen Eric can’t get to his doctor’s appointment because the car is broken. How does a county follow Uber’s creative thinking process to reinvent an app-ordered public transport system?
What does transportation have to do with adverse childhood experiences? Everything. When we talk about beating an easy path to healthy food in real grocery stores, better jobs, and good preschools, that path is often traversed by public transit. We have seen in the past decades advances in all sorts of transportation and we’re already pretty good at using existing resources (school bus networks are very impressive, after all). The ever-changing world of app-offered co-shared rides and coming revolution of autonomous vehicles could well make it all easier.
Innovations focus on solutions for urban and rural families, using technology and collaboration to ensure kids and parents get to vital services and programs.