TRANSPORTATION TRANSFORMATION: WHY A DRAMATIC SHIFT IN HOW MANY AMERICANS GET AROUND MAY APPEN SOONER THAN EXPECTED.

• Author: Barkin, Dan

Tony Seba is a big thinker who talks to business leaders and policymakers about energy and transportation. Recently, he brought his PowerPoints to Raleigh to talk to 2020 N.C. Transportation Summit attendees. Seba came to say everything is about to change, so buckle up. Attendees had heard this message before, but they live in the here and now. The guy whose engineers design Volvo trucks wasn't likely to hear Seba, drive back to Greensboro and say, "Diesel's dead to me. We're going 100% electric starting tomorrow."

But maybe some were struck by Seba's old-timey horse slides. These were pictures taken more than a century ago, including one of New York City's Fifth Avenue around 1900. The road was full of horse-drawn carriages and one car. Then he showed a picture of the same road 13 years later. It was full of cars and just one horse.

"This is how quickly disruptions happen," Seba said.

Gene Conti, a former North Carolina secretary of transportation, was still thinking about Seba's horse pictures the week after the summit, reflecting that "in a very short time frame, that whole economy flipped."

"The potential for this technological disruption to force major changes is there," Conti says. "Technologies today are much more powerful than a horse to a car."

Convergence of innovations brings big, disruptive change. Consider the current overlapping of the smartphone, massive bandwidth and the cloud. That is why Netflix, Uber and DoorDash are on your crowded home screen, next to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Yeah, TikTok. Look it up.

Experts are occasionally wrong about the velocity of disruptive change. Experts hired by AT&T in the '80s completely missed how fast cellphones would blow up long distance. Remember that when you hear that self-driving cars won't make a dent until 2040 and that electrics won't penetrate for another generation.

Seba, an MIT computer science and engineering grad, Stanford University MBA, and early Cisco Systems employee, said transportation will be disrupted fast. Electric vehicles may last three to four times as long as gas cars, making them irresistible to fleet owners. "Next year is the tipping point for purely economic reasons," Seba said. "It won't make any sense to buy gasoline cars."

But electrification is just half of it. Billions are being spent on self-driving vehicle research and development and improving technology. By 2025, self-driving cars may be 100 times safer than human-driven, Seba...