Contenido
By Rubén López Barrera, General Director of Aleatica in Mexico
It is estimated that by 2050, around 85% of the world’s population will live in cities, making it critical to place the need to optimize urban conditions on the global agenda. Mobility will be the key factor allowing us to sketch out the solutions to respond not only to the needs of the cities of the future, but also to a world that is constantly in motion.
Achieving efficient mobility is fundamental to promoting our economies’ development and societal well-being. It is essential to integrate the elements that facilitate optimal movement for people, goods, and services, and highways will continue to be one of the primary factors.
Accordingly, I would like to highlight four approaches that will help us create the highways of the future:
1. Smart Mobility Should Integrate Technology into Its Structure and Operations
As a great ally that enhances user experience and increases its safety. We should invest in free-flow systems (electronic toll collection) on roadways to ensure prepaid electronic tolling. This is important, both to cut our users’ travel time and to avoid increasing GHG emissions caused by traffic.
2. The Highways of the Future Should Also Be Sustainable
Both socially as well as for their environmental impact.
Currently, close to 20% of worldwide CO2 emissions come from the transport sector, and specifically, 10% can be attributed to road transport. Therefore, our responsibility as an industry lies in creating roads that accelerate the transport sector’s decarbonization. In this respect, using ever more clean energy sources for our operations and generating indicators that allow us to measure our progress towards net zero emissions will be essential.
An additional sustainability factor is the need to encourage the wider use of electric vehicles and to ensure that charging them is ever easier. By the end of 2020, 11.3 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million charging stations already existed, a 46% increase compared to 2019. These tendencies are growing as they show measureable contributions to the well-being of the environment.
In order to facilitate the transition, pilot projects are currently being used to research how to achieve the use of inductive systems that could offer the possibility of charging electric vehicles while they are driven on highways.
3. Improving Safety on Our Highways
It is clear that road safety standards are linked to economic development.
At present, middle and low income countries are home to 60% of the world’s vehicles, while they suffer 93% of the traffic-related deaths. The highways of the future must be designed with users always in mind, while likewise ensuring the quality of the infrastructure by incorporating the highest design and construction standards. Also, through programs directed at drivers, we must foster a culture of road safety to produce responsible and alert mobility behavior.
4. Information Analysis and Use
The highways of the future must analyze and use the information they gather as part of their daily operations. By implementing comprehensive programs that use risk management systems as the basis for algorithms yielding real-time information, it will be possible to identify and anticipate risky situations on the road. The sensorization and data capture and processing programs—both for vehicles and for road conditions—will strengthen daily operations for handling roadway assistance situations in an ever more efficient manner.
On account of this, we find ourselves with a unique chance to reach our objectives of achieving smart, sustainable, and safe mobility. However, we cannot do it alone. The forging of strategic alliances between the government, industry, and civil society is critical for moving in the right direction and bringing the highways of the future into the present.
It is a shared responsibility, so everyone, from their area of activity, should work on innovation, sustainability, road safety, and information analysis.
- Electric Vehicle Statistics, International Energy Agency, 2020
- World Health Organization, 2021
Member of the CICM (School of Civil Engineers of Mexico) Finance Committee
