*In our podcast, Roberto Speicys, from Scipopulis, explains how analyzing the different demands arising from the pandemic with data can help managers adapt better.
The first edition of our new podcast, greenTalks, features a conversation with Roberto Speicys, co-founder and CEO of Scipopulis, about the transformations in urban mobility as we face the coronavirus pandemic. For Speicys, with the fluctuations in demand for public transportation due to periods of social isolation and quarantine, the system will have to adapt quickly to regulate supply for citizens. In addition, people tend to look for new alternatives to get around and, with the need for distance, individual and low-polluting modes, such as the bicycle, are gaining strength. Follow the full interview:
**Flávia Tavares Hi guys, what's up? My name is Flávia Tavares and I'm a journalist at green4T. Today, we're launching our podcast, greentalks. It's another channel of communication and content from green4T for us to talk about. **This podcast will be on Spotify, on our YouTube channel and will be shared on our social networks and WhatsApp. For our first edition, we'll be chatting with Roberto Speicys, co-founder and CEO of Scipopulis. We're going to talk about the changes in urban mobility with these challenges we're experiencing with the coronavirus pandemic. Hi, Roberto, what's up?
**Roberto Speicys:** Hi, Flávia, how are you? Thanks for inviting me to be on the first edition of the podcast.
**Thank you. We thought we'd have a chat today about the changes in urban mobility. With all the challenges we're experiencing with the coronavirus pandemic, you can imagine that many changes are going to happen. And urban mobility, life in cities, is one of those that will have a major impact on our lives. What do you think is going to change, especially as cities begin to plan for the resumption of activities in the near future?
**Speicys:** Look, Flávia, there are still a lot of questions, right? Everyone is trying to figure out how to adapt and how to operate the transport network in this situation. But there are some certainties. One of the problems that has affected public transport networks is that these networks are normally planned on the basis of surveys that city halls and bus operating companies carry out to find out how people move around the city. They have to know where people want to go, where they come from and a big survey is carried out. Based on the results of this survey, you put together a network that meets this demand for travel, this desire for people to get around.
What has happened now with the pandemic? Everyone has been quarantined, many people who have been able to work from home have worked from home. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of people who have to keep working, people who work in essential services and have had to keep going to work. And what's happened is that this **demand that existed and for which the network was planned has totally changed**. And it has changed to a demand that nobody knows what it is, nobody has ever thought about it. **A situation was never planned in which 70% of people were going to stop using public transport and 30% were going to use it, which is what is happening here in São Paulo during the quarantine. This creates a lot of challenges, right? Because the transportation network is not used to adapting so quickly to changes.
One trend that transportation will have in the future is that you'll have new demands emerging. Different profiles of movement in the city often emerge. So, you asked about the recovery scenario. The recovery that we're seeing and imagining, that the government is proposing, is a gradual recovery. Some businesses and services are gradually coming back and others aren't yet, they're at a standstill. So, schools will come back later, restaurants... This problem of unknown demand will only increase, because **at each stage of the return to normality there will be a new unknown demand** that will appear in the city of transportation and the network will have to adapt. To give you an idea, the origin and destination survey here in São Paulo is carried out every 10 years. So the transportation network adapts every 10 years or so to a new demand. And what we're seeing now are new monthly or even daily demand scenarios. We're seeing that this is one of the trends.
Another trend is that **you won't be able to operate crowded transport in the way we used to**, because a minimum distance between passengers will be imposed and you'll hardly have crowded buses, you'll have to operate buses with a much smaller capacity than before and people will have to be prevented from getting on a bus if it's already over a certain capacity. **This is also going to require the companies that operate them to do things differently, perhaps with more vehicles, and this is going to have an impact on the whole system.
And one last trend is that many cities are taking advantage of this to **encourage more active transportation: walking on the street and also making more room for bicycles.**
**Roberto, my next question was along these lines. If, with these changes in the scenario, more agility in changing demands and non-agglomeration, this will open up space for the growth of other modes, how can we imagine this transformation? And one of these transformations is that way, right? More cycling, more walking.
**Yeah, because we're at a crossroads now. Transport by private vehicle, it's been proven, has a problem in terms of sustainability, pollution, emissions and so on. All the cities that were developing more sustainable mobility were encouraging public transport, because it is more efficient and generates fewer emissions per passenger transported. It was a way of making cities more sustainable in the long term by transporting people while reducing atmospheric emissions and the attack on the environment. But now, with the pandemic, public transport also has problems. And now it's no longer possible to transport the same number of people as before with the same number of vehicles, we're going to have to reduce or increase the number of vehicles and so on.
So, **how do we balance this need to transport people in large numbers, reducing atmospheric emissions and without having agglomerations that encourage the spread of viruses? There are many cities coming to a consensus to solve the equation in which the solution is the bicycle.** With the bicycle, you don't have the emissions that the private vehicle generates and you also don't have crowds, you make the journey at a reasonably long distance from the other person. You're not liable to be infected, the chance of catching an infectious disease is greatly reduced. This is a path that some cities are adopting. Buenos Aires has now converted some bus lanes, because there are fewer buses in circulation, into cycle lanes so that people who need to get around have more space to cycle.
Another trend is simply a **reduction in the number of trips**. Many people will stop making some trips because they've realized that they don't need to go to the office every day, for example, or that they can hold some meetings remotely. Some trips during the day to hold a meeting will disappear. Overall, there will be a reduction in the number of journeys made per day in cities.
**Flavia: Cool, Roberto. In general, what is certain is that there will be some transformation, right? That's for sure. And that everyone will have to experiment, gather data and a lot of information. A lot of information and a lot of technology to help find this kind of way out.
**Because we're going to have to learn by doing, aren't we? There are many new situations and there's no history of operating a mobility network, there's no tradition that you can rely on to make a decision, to say “look, this is a neighborhood that's always been like this, or this is an avenue that's always been like that”. Because everything has suddenly changed, we're in a different reality, and there's no history of operating and using the city under these conditions. Sometimes, in some older cities, they already have an established transport network and you already have a lot of behavior that is known, from the practice of operation, of the city on a daily basis. But even these cities today are experiencing an unprecedented scenario. So, **the quickest way to learn is to collect as much data as possible while the city is operating in order to understand this new reality** and how you organize the city, how people organize themselves and how citizen services are organized in this new reality that is emerging. As I said, it's not a new reality, because we're going to have measures that will create new uses for the city as services are re-established. So there are going to be several new realities that will emerge in the cities, which will have to adapt to all of them.
**Flávia:** Cool, Roberto, thank you very much for your participation and see you next time, guys.
**Imagine, thank you, thank you for the opportunity and we'll see you in another episode. Bye, bye.