The future of mobility podcast

What does the future of Australian mobility look like?

ARRB chief executive officer Michael Caltabiano and former Roads Australia chief executive Ian Webb join Guy Hand on the latest episode of the Road Research Radio podcast to discuss issues like how we will move from point A to point B in years to come, how users should be charged for roads, and why government needs to get moving on future mobility solutions.

Some excerpts from a fascinating discussion include:

"We're on the edge of a revolution ... what this makes possible is the end of private transport." - Ian Webb

"Of all the first-world countries, Australia is the only one without a connected and automated test bed ... we are literally a decade behind. We're still trialling little shuttles around Australia when the rest of the world has moved on." - Michael Caltabiano

"At the present time, we are still funding and building roads much as we always did, in the belief that our road system is going to be there provided to the world as a service, when it's about to become a business." - Ian Webb

"If I want a red four-wheel-drive over the weekend, I just dial up at 6pm on a Friday afternoon and a four-wheel-drive appears in the front yard, use my mobile phone to access it, and off we go. Leave it there at 6pm on Sunday evening and somebody else comes and picks it up and takes it away, or it drives itself away. (This) is the future model. This is not something that's 10 or 20 years away, this is almost touch and feel it now. The uptake from a society of these services is going to happen in the blink of an eye." - Michael Caltabiano

"We need to rethink the way we fund our infrastructure ... we need to have a system in place where the users of the roads understand they'll pay a distance-based charge." - Ian Webb.

Listen to the podcast by clicking the orange arrow on the image below: