“A developed country is not a place where the poor can afford cars, but rather, where the rich use public transport.” This quote comes from the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa. In its pithy way, it captures many deep truisms. Public transport has huge environmental and economic benefits, but it is widely used only when the network is complex and widespread, and the system reliability is very high. For this to happen, large upfront investments, which serve multiple generations, are needed. Most of the infrastructure needs public funding, which in turn requires deep fiscal pockets, a large base of taxation and long-term debt and bond markets. Of course, the option of public versus private transport is not a binary separation. There is an in-between category increasingly filled by a phenomenon called “transport as a service” (TaaS): a paradigm where people are using a hybrid combination of public and private transport, combined with the sharing economy, cashless payments with swipe cards and the GPS-enabled smartphone. Uberization will soon also usher in the use of driverless autonomous vehicles, owned not by private individuals or cities, but by fleet owners and large companies. The uberization phenomenon is spreading fast in Indian cities, and is already extending to logistics and trucking. A developed country then is one with a fully optimized and uberized TaaS system, containing a medley of buses and trains, and solar-powered battery-operated cars.

(Live Mint)