The Overhead Wire Daily | May 1st, 2024 | Digital Public Utilities
May 1, 2024
One of the things we’ve been thinking about a lot is the idea of transportation infrastructure as a public utility. Now more than ever I believe streets and rights of way are public utilities considering the value of this urban space we use for human transportation and goods movement, water management, and electricity and internet provision. Giving it away for free has led to many perverse incentives including vehicles now roaming around without passengers and private vehicle storage consuming acres of public lands.
So back in 2019 we had the amazing Nate Berg write a piece for us and Moovel discussing the tug of war between private companies and public entities on transportation data, which Nate evolved out of some of my thinking about whether streets could be seen as a public utility. The discussion was heating up due to ride hailing and micromobility companies vying for space on city streets while collecting massive amounts of data. What they also did was move the discussion from the use of physical space to another digital dimension about data and ownership.
It’s interesting to me then that our conversation on digital data from mobility companies in urban spaces can also be extrapolated to mapping technology and companies such as Google, Apple, Baidu, and ESRI that have created powerful mapping and GIS tools that have evolved into their own public utilities parallel to physical rights of way and digital data created by mobility companies. The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society then asks whether we’ll see continued consolidation or monopolization in this space, or a new diverse set of companies and tools emerge from this mapping ecosystem that is becoming so vital not only to transportation, but the facilitation of information sharing and knowledge itself.
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