Urban Mobility 2030: Autonomy, Electrification, and the Cities Being Built for Neither

Making predictions about 2030 urban mobility is somewhat easier than making predictions about 2025 because the trajectories are visible and most of the relevant decisions have already been made. The wild cards are fewer. Here's what I actually expect rather than what I wish would happen.

EVs will be the majority of new vehicle sales in most major markets. China crossed that threshold in 2024; Europe is at roughly 25% and accelerating; the US is slower but moving. The global installed base of EVs will still be a minority of vehicles on the road because the fleet turns over slowly, but the new car purchase decision in most markets will be defaulting to electric by 2030. This creates different problems than ICE dominance (charging infrastructure, grid load management, battery recycling) rather than no problems at all.

Robotaxis will be commercially available in 20-50 cities worldwide but won't be the primary mode of transport for most urban residents in those cities. Waymo, and possibly Zoox, Baidu Apollo, WeRide, and whoever else survives the consolidation, will operate in geofenced urban areas in cities that have clear weather and well-mapped road conditions. The economics will work in dense urban areas with high utilization. Phoenix, San Francisco, Austin in the US; Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai in China; potentially one or two European cities with favorable regulatory environments.

Public transit will remain the mobility backbone of functional large cities, and cities that have invested in it will have a structural advantage. Cities that deferred transit investment through the 2020s in hopes that AVs or scooters would solve the problem will be in worse shape, not better.

Urban bike infrastructure will continue expanding, particularly in European cities where the political conditions for it exist, and in some US cities where local politics have shifted. E-bike adoption will accelerate — the product category has hit a quality and price point where it replaces car trips in a wide range of weather conditions for a wide range of users.

The car ownership model will begin declining in specific dense urban environments — not because of anything dramatic, but because the combination of EV subscription services, better public transit integration, and improved micromobility options is making car ownership less necessary than it was. This effect will be city-specific and will track income distribution: urban dense dwellers, especially younger ones with higher incomes, will increasingly not own cars. Suburban and rural areas will look much the same as today.

Absent a significant policy intervention or a technology surprise, 2030 urban mobility will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary: cleaner vehicles, more robots in specific use cases, better integration of modes in cities that prioritize it, and persistent infrastructure inequality between wealthy and less-wealthy urban areas. The dystopian predictions will be wrong in the ways they always are, and so will the utopian ones.

What Urban Mobility Actually Looks Like in 2030

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