Conference Presentation, Panel
Smart Cities and the Future of Urban Infrastructure
Milken InstituteSultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Lukasz Gadowski, Karl Magnus Olsson, Hamed Zaghw, Lukas, Magnus, Hamid, Fahad Al-Sharikh
- Smart Dubai aims to become the world's happiest city by 2030 through initiatives designed to improve the overall quality of life for residents.
- Volocopter plans to initiate air taxi pilot services in 2020, with expectations of full-scale operations handling hundreds of thousands of daily passengers by 2022 or 2023.
- To ensure accessibility beyond the top 1%, Volocopter targets making air taxi services approximately 10 times cheaper than traditional helicopters, anticipating a future where on-demand landing pads evolve into centralized hub systems.
- Magnus projects a significant shift in transportation where shared resources replace individual car ownership, reducing the current 90% of time vehicles spend parked and treating mobility as essential utility rather than luxury.
- Kareem estimates that providing easy mobility solutions could enable close to 3 million Saudi women currently not in the workforce to enter employment.
- Government regulations for ride-hailing are being updated globally, with new frameworks established in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan to support smart city ecosystems.
- Unified identification and payment systems are identified as necessary infrastructure components, while applications for regions with lower standards must be capable of functioning during intermittent internet connectivity.
- Magnus asserts that the UAE achieved 93% fiber connectivity to homes in every building 12 years ago, and Dubai has set a vision for X percent of all vehicles to be autonomous by 2025.
- Governments are advised to set main parameters and objectives to incentivize private sector innovation rather than mandating specific technologies, alongside creating open data platforms to enable entrepreneurial development.
- Hamid notes that the physical infrastructure industry is currently not fully adapted to the knowledge required for current technologies and predicts that engineering education must evolve to address new technological changes in transportation planning.