Last week we shared Part 1 of our Q&A with Michal Nakashimada, Head of New Modes at Ride Report. Here’s Part 2.
Photo by Okai Vehicles on Unsplash
Michal Nakashimada, Head of New Modes, is one of the leading voices in the emerging mobility space. In addition to his role ensuring that the Ride Report suite of tools works for many forms of mobility, he writes the Movements newsletter, a roundup of stories about the mobility industry, focusing on mobility software, cities, and infrastructure.
He recently shared his thoughts on the state of the mobility industry in 2021. He had so many valuable insights to share that we’re dividing this Q&A into two parts. Here’s Part 1.
In May, we wrote about progress on the proposed American Jobs Plan that includes significant funding for transportation infrastructure.
Now the bill, with the official title "Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act," has been repackaged as an economic plan and budget blueprint that covers social and physical infrastructure. It is getting closer to approval with the ambitious goal of passage by the end of September. Its size is astounding both on paper and in dollar value.
This month, our updates include two functionality improvements to the Analyze tab: the addition of trip ends and a new interface for picking dates. Read on to learn more about why these matter.
Photo by Qinghong Shen on Unsplash
Carsharing is a unique mobility option that provides the flexibility of a car without needing to actually own one. Individuals using carshare are able to save money on maintenance, gas, and insurance, and worry less about parking. For cities, the benefits of carshare are even greater. Every carshare vehicle takes 13 personally owned cars off the road and encourages more people to use alternative modes of transportation. This in turn helps combat climate change, puts less stress on a city’s roads, and complements the local transportation systems.
Ride Report is excited to share some of the improvements we have made to our solutions in June. This month, we have begun using the MDS trips endpoint for improved trip count accuracy. We also have added carshare to our platform, enabling cities to now manage carshare programs from within the dashboard.
Photo by Vince Jacob on Unsplash
Our mission at Ride Report is to help accelerate the transition to a sustainable and efficient transportation system, and city revenue generated from new mobility will be a critical part of that transition. When managed effectively, this revenue can be utilized to fund new infrastructure and pay for programs that increase mode-shift and deliver positive city outcomes.
Today, we’re excited to share that Ride Report has tracked over $1.2 million dollars in dynamic shared mobility usage revenue across our city customers worldwide. In addition to tracking city revenue, we also have tools to help cities invoice the operators for micromobility fees.
Photo by Aaron Doucett on Unsplash
I started my transportation career in the fall of 2008, as the economy was unravelling at the start of what would become the Great Recession. Obama was elected within a couple of months and in early 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a $787B stimulus package that included significant funding ($48B) for transportation infrastructure. As with many packages of this nature, the focus was on projects that were “shovel-ready” and could spend the federal funds quickly on tangible projects.
Ride Report Policy module
Policy module supports digital program management
Ride Report has developed a Policy module as a one-stop shop for creating and sharing rules with operators. Policy module also allows cities to transparently track performance against those rules. With just a few clicks of a button, program managers can enter in maximum caps, minimum floors/deployments, no-ride zones, slow speed zones, and fees/fines/subsidies. Operators are able to view these same rules and their own performance in the operator dashboard.
In the month of April, we have made several improvements to the dashboard that make it even easier for cities to understand and manage their micromobility programs. Self-draw Areas of Interest (AOIs) allow cities to explore and understand micromobility behavior in custom geographies, while multi-metrics line charts in the Analyze tab enable cities to compare and normalize multiple metrics in the same chart.
Read on to learn more about how these updates help cities better utilize their program data.