In this episode we head to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where the future of transportation can be found in the form of a humble bus.
You many have imagined a future of transit where we all blast off to work strapped into personal jetpacks or shuttle our kids to and from school in flying cars. But the future is now, and the innovative transportation systems of today are surprising in their own right. The best among them are reimagining infrastructure design and project funding to get people moving across town and around the globe.
In this second episode of the new season of the Ideas podcast, we head to a place where the future of transportation is already in motion: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. There, we ride a DART bus, one of the most advanced bus rapid transit systems in the world. Steven Higashide, Director of Research for TransitCenter, helps us understand the road blocks between U.S. cities and better public transit, and we learn from Sarah Kaufman, of the Rudin Center Transportation at NYU, about ways to move beyond ride sharing and fill the gaps that existing transportation can’t cover. Finally, Michael Zezas, Managing Director and Chief U.S. Public Policy & Municipal Strategist at Morgan Stanley, helps us imagine a future of interconnected services—autonomous vehicles linking riders to mass transit on rails and roads—that respond creatively to the city’s existing infrastructure challenges.