Fukumaru:
Today I would like to discuss the future of mobility. Specifically, what technologies will be needed if transportation is to help overcome the challenges facing the world’s cities, and what sort of society we can expect this to bring about.

To begin, I would like to ask Shuichi Furumi, whose many years working as a spatial producer have taken him to cities around the world, about the initiatives currently underway in different locations.

Furumi:
The sense that I have gained from seeing these different places is of how urban planning and mobility form an organic network. Whether it be in Paris, Munich, or Amsterdam, transportation is more than just a means of getting from place to place, it is also playing a vital part in people’s activities and their quality of life.

Let’s start with Paris. The reason I visit the city twice a year is that it is a world leader when it comes to hosting a large number of exhibitions. It is remarkable for having a wide range of venues, extending from large facilities like the Louvre to specialist art galleries and entertainment centers, with new sites opening every year.

However, while this makes the city a magnet for large numbers of people, it is no easy task to build new transportation services while retaining the city’s historic character. In this regard, I understand that Paris is currently pursuing initiatives that incorporate the “15-minute city” concept as part of its urban design strategy. This means being able to access all the essential functions of daily life within a 15-minute walk, or 5 minutes on bicycle, whether it be shopping, work, recreation, culture, sport, or healthcare. Initiatives aimed at making this possible include restricting vehicle access to the city center and making provisions for foot traffic and cycleways.

One person from whom the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, sought advice on this was Professor Carlos Moreno of Sorbonne University. According to the professor, cities should not be built on the assumption that people will commute from the suburbs. Rather, it is better to build cities that form a societal network that fully encompasses the six essential functions of living, working, supplying, caring, learning, and enjoying, and that doing so fosters a sense of wellbeing. On a visit that coincided with the opening of the Paris Olympics, the congestion forced me to get around on foot. I found this fostered communication as well as being environmentally friendly and good for my health. Walking around Paris, I realized that, rather than wondering how quickly you can get to where you are going, thinking about how free you are to enjoy yourself is an essential part of human wellbeing and urban attractiveness.

Fukumaru:
So, through human-scale urban development, Paris is transforming the very nature of the city.

Furumi:
Munich, meanwhile, is well-known as a cluster of major German automotive manufacturers. The relocation in 2021 of the IAA Mobility motor show from Frankfurt to Munich caught people’s attention. While the business-to-business (B2B) trade show continued as before, temporary pavilions for the general public were set up in town squares and other public places, with local residents and tourists able to enter free of charge. One could get a feel for this from the 2025 theme of “It's all about Mobility,” with the provision of free personal mobility services that included the use of electric rikshaws to transport people from place to place. For 2026, they are looking at providing free self-driving microbuses to help overcome the challenges of north-south travel within Munich.

Finally there is Amsterdam, which is known for its cycleways. The city has a very high level of environmental awareness, one factor in which is fear of flooding due to sea-level rise caused by global warming, and this is driving comprehensive measures for making the transition to electric vehicles (EV), both in public transportation and automobiles. The city is pursuing urban mobility measures on a variety of fronts, including the use of ferries (as befits its status as a port city); the coexistence of trams, buses, and bicycles in the city center; and the provision of bike stands to facilitate this.

Something that all three places have in common is that the adoption of new forms of mobility is integrated into their urban planning while still retaining their city’s historic character. It no longer makes sense to address transportation and urban planning independently. Through an organic fusion that encompasses mobility-as-a-service (MaaS); connected, autonomous, shared & services, and electric (CASE); and artificial intelligence (AI), we can look forward to a future in which cities are ever more attractive and environmentally friendly.

Agatsuma:
I lived in London for more than 20 years and visited Paris and Munich on numerous occasions. Like Furumi-san, I noticed how the cities became increasingly attractive over time.

However, the more attractive a city gets, the more people it attracts. According to one report^*1), the total urban population will double from its current level by 2050. Indeed, demand for intercity transportation is also increasing and has already exceeded pre-COVID levels. In the case of the UK, there has been a rapid rise in the number of people travelling on weekends, so much so that overcrowding on long-distance services has become a problem.

Meanwhile, railway infrastructure continues to age. The UK celebrated the 200th anniversary of the introduction of railways in 2025, and in Japan the history of rail goes back more than 150 years. In Japan, where the total length of railways is around 27,000 km, moves are underway to replace the Doctor Yellow trainsets used for track geometry measurement and inspection with in-service monitoring whereby the sensors are instead mounted on passenger trains. The UK, too, is moving in the same direction, with breakages in overhead wires caused by aging having become a frequent occurrence. Another problem is that, while the growth in passenger numbers calls for increases in the frequency of maintenance and inspection, railways are unable to obtain the workforce needed to accomplish this. Recruiting workers to undertake overnight maintenance work is no easy task. This is driving our railway operator clients to look at the use of cameras and other sensors as a means of reducing maintenance and inspection workloads.

Fukumaru:
As infrastructure ages and fewer people are available to look after it, it is creating a need to reconsider how maintenance work is performed.

Agatsuma:
Energy consumption is also a problem. The energy price inflation we are currently experiencing has operators telling us they want to reduce electricity consumption as much as possible, while environmental considerations mean that they also want to optimize the frequency of things like parts replacement.The bearings fitted to vital equipment are one such example. These need to be replaced periodically as damage can result in a reliability issue. In the case of the rolling stock operating on long-distance railway lines in the UK, the practice was to replace all 6,000 or so bearings every two years. When sensors were fitted and an analysis conducted, however, only two of the bearings were found to be in poor condition. By using sensors for continuous condition monitoring, we were able to make considerable savings in both CO₂ emissions and maintenance costs. The ability of sensors and cameras to detect problems prior to failure significantly improves reliability.

As this example shows, railway operators are seeking solutions to a wide range of problems and are also achieving good results.

Fukumaru:
I expect that analysis of the complex problems faced by railway operators also offers considerable scope for the use of AI.

Takahashi:
The term physical AI is one that has come to be heard in recent years as AI equipped robots have grown in their capabilities. They can now meet a wide variety of needs, being able to learn from data in real time and to perform complex actions. Which is not to say, however, that robots can be relied upon to take on all tasks. Rather, what matters is how overall operations can be made more efficient, including the part of the work that is done by humans. The key lies in interoperative design that allows work to proceed smoothly with responsibilities divided between humans and robots, humans having ultimate responsibility for those critical points that cannot be overlooked even as other aspects are delegated to robots.

*1) World Bank Group: Urban Development Overview

Fukumaru:
What do you see as important when it comes to the introduction of new forms of mobility?

Agatsuma:
For transportation users, reliability matters more than anything else. Also, whether or not services are environmentally friendly. Furumi-san spoke earlier about what is happening in Munich, where I got the impression that most of the taxis serving city streets are Japanese vehicles. When I asked the drivers why this was, they said it was all about reliability and fuel economy.

When you look at it like that, it seems that what matters most about mobility is reliability and consideration for the environment. This suggests that self-driving metro services will increase and we are ourselves currently working on implementing autonomous operation for trams.

Takahashi:
Reliability is certainly very important when it comes to autonomous driving. How can we ensure the safe interoperation of public transportation such as trams alongside cars, bicycles, and pedestrians? As trams operate on rails that run along the same streets that are used by pedestrians and private vehicles, they are not able to swerve to one side when confronted with an obstacle. Instead, they have no other option but to stop. Given that their breaking distance is also longer than that of ordinary vehicles, technologies for more rapid and accurate detection will be vital.

Furumi:
While I confess to feeling uneasy when I rode a driverless taxi in San Francisco, I was also conscious that the autonomous taxi was superior to a human driver in things like the smoothness of its braking and how pre-emptive it was in collision avoidance actions. It also felt a little like taking a carnival ride.

Agatsuma:
In the future, if all forms of mobility including trams, metros, taxis, cars, and bicycles can be linked together in networks and controlled in an optimal manner, it will reduce the mental burden of paying attention to safety and allow people to get from place to place without stress. In doing so, it will likely play an important part in people feeling good about their quality of life.

Another factor in Europe right now is the very strong demand for battery-electric trams out of consideration for the environment. I suspect that the primary reason for this is that legacy overhead wires and power lines are seen as an eyesore that detract from attractive city backdrops.

The more urbanization accelerates and populations continue to grow, the more vital I expect smooth transportation and concern for the environment will become, with the transition to driverless public transportation set to be an extremely important part of the solution.

Agatsuma:
I spoke earlier about in-service monitoring whereby sensors are mounted on passenger trains and used for the condition monitoring of railway lines. The same concept also works on cars. London, for example, is plagued by potholes in its roads, with public finances being put under pressure by the compensation that local government pays out for wheel damage or tire punctures caused by cars driving into these holes. If ordinary cars could be used for the condition monitoring of infrastructure, warning signs of developing potholes could be detected and repairs made pre-emptively.

Furumi:
I read a report by a tire manufacturer recently about the numerous sensors being fitted to today’s tires, capable of sensing not only punctures, but also weather conditions and of reading the road to facilitate safe driving. Vehicle manufacturers are also providing the ability to read undulations and other road surface conditions under the hood and of absorbing the impact of the different sized bumps that occur. Given the ability to communicate between vehicles, this capability could further improve driving safety by predicting road conditions based on the experience of the vehicles ahead.

Agatsuma:
Seat sensors are another area where advances are being made, and it could be that quantum sensors will be woven into the fabric of seats within a few years. The hope is that these will be used to provide more accurate biometric information about the driver or about where best to apply the brakes, pre-emptively preventing congestion and accidents or extending the life of infrastructure.

Takahashi:
If this is to be realized, however, I believe it will require someone able to provide oversight of all these autonomous vehicles. Having self-driving vehicles operate independently of one another will only result in more congestion and problems. If autonomous driving results in all vehicles using the exact same part of the road, it will only encourage ruts to form and speed up road surface degradation. What is needed is someone able to provide supervisory-level control of the entire infrastructure, instructing one vehicle to drive slightly to the right and the next to drive slightly to the left, and so on.

Along with improvements in the accuracy of sensors and cameras, standardization will likely also be needed. Even if able to identify the location of potholes, the information from cameras will not be available for analysis if there is high degree of variation in how it is handled by the different car companies. The legal framework also needs to be established, such as identifying where the ownership of data from autonomous vehicles resides.

Furumi:
I see. You are saying we need a common platform for autonomous driving, one that can provide supervision at a higher level.

Agatsuma:
The idea of utilizing AI to overcome societal challenges is a major theme in HMAXTM^*2) by Hitachi. This is because there is no point in thinking about autonomous driving if the roads are riddled with potholes. The same applies to railways where self-driving is not an option without reliable infrastructure. This means collating large quantities of data from expansive urban transportation systems and transforming it into meaningful information so that it can ultimately be put to use in a variety of predictions that assist with maintenance. The greatest challenge is how to go about establishing this infrastructural platform.

Takahashi:
One leading initiative in this area is a collaborative creation project for the next-generation cities of the future in which Hitachi City and Hitachi the company are collaborating on smarter public transportation. The project is working through a cycle that involves the use of digital technology to visualize movements of transportation and people, the incorporation of this information into policy measures, and the assessment of what changes this will bring to the city. It is also vital that we give thought to how these individual outcomes can be scaled.

Furumi:
Every city has its own character. A key point then, I believe, is how do you identify what they have in common and use it to bring about a smart transformation that also brings out the best in the particular city you are working with.

*2)
A suite of next-generation solutions that use AI to upgrade social infrastructure. HMAX provides solutions that deliver new value around the world by combining large quantities of data obtained from both physical and digital assets with advanced AI and domain knowledge that Hitachi has built up over many years. HMAX Mobility is intended to deliver smarter, optimized transportation systems together with autonomous driving and mobility that works with the Internet of Things (IoT).

Fukumaru:
So far, we have been talking about various solutions and technologies that can help to overcome the challenges that cities face right now. Finally, I would like you to tell me about your vision for future transportation once these solutions are in place and the amazing things that will become possible when these transportation experiences become a reality.

Furumi:
As I mentioned at the beginning, I believe that the purpose of cities is to maximize people’s freedom of activity. Achieving this calls for designs in which all the elements of living, working, education, and transportation are interlinked, to the extent that thinking about urban planning and transportation in isolation from one another should not even be possible. Moreover, more than just a means of getting from place to place, the experience aspects of mobility as a form of activity will play a stronger role in the future. Underpinning this will be advanced technologies such as sensing and autonomous driving. This should also boost people’s wellbeing as these technologies optimize themselves autonomously through mutual interconnections. An unexpected outcome from today is how discussing these topics with you has provided me with an opportunity to review and reassess my own future vision for cities.

Fukumaru:
The purpose of transportation is not just to move goods and people from place to place, but also to maximize people’s activity. Piece by piece, an outline of the technologies that underpin this premise is coming into view.

Agatsuma:
As Furumi-san also noted, whatever type of transportation experience we are talking about, transportation should be more than just stress-free. Having an additional entertainment component is also important when considering what will maximize people’s wellbeing. This involves taking advantage of the capabilities of digital technology to make infrastructure more robust and using data to foster people’s wellbeing. Today has been a reminder that this is what HMAX is all about.

Takahashi:
Just as happens with people’s bodies, cities and neighborhoods also become unhealthy when they stagnate. The more dynamic a neighborhood is, the more active it becomes, with mobility playing a very important part when it comes to fostering this process. There is a limit, however, to how far human effort alone can push this activity, meaning that automation with a high level of reliability is also essential. This is an area where we hope to contribute. When such activity is present, neighborhoods experience ongoing change and the character of the city changes with it. This change is something I want to enjoy and so this is my vision for the future.

Fukumaru:
My sense of what form mobility will take in the cities of the future has expanded in many different ways. Thank you for your time today.