Transportation is the center of the world! It is the glue of our daily lives. When it goes well, we don't see it. When it goes wrong, it negatively colors our day, makes us feel angry and impotent, curtails our possibilities.
In the industrial revolution Britain led the world in advances that enabled mass production: trade exchanges, transportation, factory technology and new skills needed for the new industrialised world.
The auto industry must acknowledge that a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility.
I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?'
Smart businesses do not look at labor costs alone anymore. They do look at market access, transportation, telecommunications infrastructure and the education and skill level of the workforce, the development of capital and the regulatory market.
I hope climate science becomes the big thing. And then what I want is electrical engineers to solve the world's energy problems, energy distribution problems. I want mechanical engineers to make better transportation systems. I want chemical engineers to develop better solar panels, and so on.
The reality about transportation is that it's future-oriented. If we're planning for what we have, we're behind the curve.
What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike.
My favorite form of transportation is walking. I live in a neighborhood where you can walk to restaurants, banks, and shops.
My innovation involved taking an idea from the telecommunications and banking industries, and applying that idea to transportation business.