People today are hardly sedentary. Thanks, in part, to advances in smartphone technology and location-based services, the average person has the freedom to work, travel, and play wherever they choose. People are, in a word, “mobile,” because of the increasing integration of the smartphone in daily life.
A vast majority of Americans, 77 percent to be exact, owned a smartphone in 2016, per the Pew Research Center. This mobile technology is offering users new ways to tailor their personal and work lives to maximize productivity and experience.
The freedom that location-based services now offers the end-user has created a new kind of freedom that Andrew Kupiec, global president, CBRE 360, calls “technology mobility.”
“Mobility cuts across so many aspects of our lives. Humans are designed to move around, interact with and experience new places, new environments and new people,” says Kupiec.
According to a 2017 report by University of California Davis, “Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization and Impact of Ride-Hailing in the United States,” 24 percent of people living in major metro areas that include Boston and Los Angeles use ride-hailing services. By 2030, Boston Consulting Group predicts that 25 percent of all miles driven in the United States—nearly 925 billion miles—could be in shared self-driving cars by 2030.
The rise of car-sharing services and ride-hailing services is a reflection of “a shift away from vehicles as a product to vehicles as a mobility service,” according to the University of California Davis report.
Kupiec adds that it is not the smartphone but the service itself—the ride-share app, the online grocery, the food delivery application—that facilitates this mobility.