In this episode of the Smart Community podcast, I have a brilliant chat with Ryan McManus, the Founder and CEO of SHARE Mobility, a mobility company that helps organisations and cities solve big transportation problems with mobility-as-a-service. Ryan and I met on my trip recently to Columbus, Ohio, which was in January, 2020. I met Ryan at a meeting with Smart Columbus where I learned about the work they’re doing. Now obviously, this episode was recorded before the corona virus became a pandemic. Currently SHARE is repurposing their shared transport network and customer support staff to serve the needs of the people who are staying at home. 

On the topic of Covid-19, I just want to give you a little bit of an update of what our team is doing to respond. Our My Smart Community team was virtual already and will remain this way. We are following the health advice and following hygiene and social distancing precautions. For now, the podcast will continue as per usual while the situation continues to develop, but down the track and once there’s a bit more data, we anticipate and doing few episodes on this pandemic.  In the meantime, we will continue to provide you with regular podcast content to entertain and educate you. If you’re finding yourself with more time on your hands than usual, remember we have a wonderful back catalogue of episodes for your listening pleasure!

Now, more than ever, it’s time to be Smart and make our technology work for us so that we can stay human. We use it to work as we need to, for us and our teams and be able to adapt as the needs change. We can use it to consume credible information from credible sources and stay up to date with the latest advice and switch off from the channels that aren’t serving us right now. We can use it to be kind, understand that we may need to do things differently for a while and reach out to those who might find themselves isolated, or vulnerable. To be smart, so that we can stay human.

In this episode Ryan and I discuss his interest in cars and innovation, and how he brought concepts from IoT and automotive industries together to create SHARE. We talk about how SHARE works and the gap they are fulfilling that is different from both public transit and from what ride-sharing companies were providing. Ryan tells us what a Smart Community means to him, and how we can integrate mobility into our communities. We discuss some of the projects Ryan has been working on, the different ways organisations are working together in Columbus to solve mobility problems, and the benefits of working in the Smart Columbus ecosystem. We finish our chat talking about the emerging trends of the opportunity for improvement when it comes to insurance in the mobility space, as well as the ever-important topic of data being used for public good. As always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

Listen here:

What we cover in this episode:

• Ryan’s interest in cars and innovation, and how he brought concepts from IoT and automotive industries together to create SHARE
• How SHARE works and the gap they are fulfilling that is different from both public transit and from what ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft were providing
• What the Smart City and Community concept mean to Ryan 
• Our collective love affair with vehicles and driving
• How we can integrate mobility into our communities 
• Some of the projects Ryan has been working on
• The different ways organisations are working together in Columbus to solve mobility problems
• The benefits of working in the Smart Columbus ecosystem
• The power of having a node or a navigator like Smart Columbus to connect with partners 
• The emerging trends of the opportunity for improvement when it comes to insurance in the mobility space
• The ever-important topic of data being used for public good

Quotes:

“By making it really, really easy to schedule and plan your ride, we’re getting people to change their behaviour. The impact that I’m trying to make on a Smart City is to show people that if they can use a mobility service more, then that’s going to allow traffic to go down, it’s going to allow environmental impact to go down. Ultimately, it’s going to allow new, connected, assisted and eventually fully autonomous vehicles to be a primary motive of moving around. But it’s that behaviour change that I think is so needed in our cities right now.”

“I think you can separate the love affair people have with driving and our need to move to a shared autonomous future. People will be able to enjoy driving in some capacity for a very, very long time. But the need to move to a shared autonomous future is so important because if we get to a world of autonomous vehicles, and everyone is still using their own device…it’s the hell scenario of the roads where there’s more more cars than people out on the roads.”

“I look at mobility as this ecosystem that has a fixed cost. Right now, the fixed cost is really, really high because we’re all driving our own cars, buying gas and things individually and we’re not riding transit as much as we could and should be. It’s not working efficiently. If we can move to a world where people are sharing their rides more, sharing those vehicle assets more and planning some of these trips, the total cost of

the mobility ecosystem is going to come way down.”

“We have to learn to be able to share our vehicles if if we want to see a future where we have less of them.”

“Establishing the rules of the game upfront for how this data can be collected, how private information can be protected, and how it’s going to be used for the betterment of the community—that needs to be talked about in a very public way. It might be talked about amongst Smart City circles, but I don’t think the general public is involved in that conversation enough.”

Links: 

Smart Columbus 

This article about people as sensors rather as things to be sensed 

Connect:

Connect with Ryan @rynmcmns on Twitter or via RidewithShare.com 

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

Podcast Production by Perk Digital