انتقال و تحرک تغییر در فناوری اطلاعات و ارتباطات: توجه به شکاف سیاسی!

Assessment of new developments in the transport system as a result of ICT's leads us to four major challenges, requiring policy makers to adopt a more proactive approach in order to deal with these. First, the behavioural patterns in space and time are becoming more and more whimsical and less predictable, while infrastructure such as road or rail is inherently robust, inert and takes a long time to plan and build. Yet somehow, the mice and the elephant will have to (learn to) dance together., Second, social equity is a major concern when accessibility becomes more and more dependent on privately run platforms and transport service providers using unknown algorithms. Access can be limited in multiple ways. Physical access can be an issue (service provider may shun certain neighbourhoods). However, more and more it is a matter of skills and psychological flexibility to keep up with new things (for example smart ticketing in public transport or using apps for travel information) and not everyone can cope with that. Third, there appears to be a strong ‘winner-takes-it-all’ tendency in the ICT sector. Tech companies become rich, powerful and unassailable, while they profit from collectively financed infrastructure (e.g. Uber). The costs for development, maintenance, education, safety etcetera are left to the public domain, as are the consequences of monopolisation, unfair competition and loss of innovation power. The question is how to price public goods and external effects properly. And fourth, robots and algorithms are quickly becoming independent actors in the transport system, while our rules and regulations are primarily made for humans and organisations. We need to think about requirements for (self-learning) software and robots such as self-driving vehicles, reflecting what moral choices we prefer in critical situations, what we want them to do for us and what not and how to deal with the liability issues that arise.