Transportation: An industry ripe for disruption

Luckily, I have a blog where I can post things that matter to me. If you are interested in entrepreneurship, let’s play with some ideas here regarding transportation.

After doing my monthly budget, I’m always looking at my transportation costs in astonishment. Transportation is ripe for new solutions. Let’s look at my costs here:

MONTHLY COSTS

• Gas $200
• Sunpass $100
• Car maintenance: $60
• Annual Tire change $500/12 (monthly round number) $60
• Insurance (totaled a car in 2018) $500 as a young male.
• Car Payment: $250 (luckily I don’t have one, but using $250 as a normal number for people)
• Random repairs: $$$? ($1,000-$5,000)
• Car wash? Not going to include
• Total: $1,170 and I’m sure I’m missing stuff…

How is that even legal? That’s $14,040 after tax dollars per year. I don’t understand how we are letting this slip from under our sights.

The average person in Florida under 25 makes 30K a year. Interesting that the time where insurance companies charge the most (which I’m sure they need to) also comes to a point where those “at risk” drivers are earning the lowest wages.

When I studied urban planning in college, I noticed that there’s a lot of ways to build cities and transportation within those cities to support doing fun things, going to university, working, dining at restaurants, and living all in one area without needing to transport long range.

Here are some of the problems I see in the current transportation system:

• Waste of time in vehicles. Having to drive ourselves makes us less able to work, talk on phone, have any economic output etc (obviously autonomous vehicles will help this)
• Thousands of deaths in vehicles
• Astronomical insurance prices
• Gas prices vulnerable to worldwide conflicts ie Middle East stuff right now (could raise at any moment)
• Carbon emissions
• Etc

How can we get to where we need to go with less waste?

Can we change some of our jobs so we don’t have to go far?

How much of our travel is really essential?

Does where we live make sense? Can we live closer to job opportunities or create opportunities online and live near parks, food, restaurants etc to still have a fulfilling life?

Let’s look at some of these things.

• Alternative transportation
• Working with local government for better bike and train for longer distances.
• Creating jobs that need less office work or working from home more frequently.
• Having safe and affordable housing within districts with good jobs and recreational activities.