Wakanda is Closer Than You Think
Wakanda in Black Panther | Credit: Marvel Studios
Our environment is suffering, our economy is stagnating, COVID is now a permanent fixture in our lives, and politics have never been so divisive. It’s easy to feel world-weary these days—and for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about transportation, it’s even easier to feel hopelessly mired in a soup of “traffic, smog, lost productivity, and rage”. Still, at the heart of the transportation industry is a cadre of public servants, dedicated to spending their working days inching us toward a mobility vision that is perfectly seamless, terrifically multimodal, environmentally responsible, and profoundly humanistic.
In 2018 director Ryan Coogler managed to put visuals to this (dare I say it?) utopian ideal in his record-smashing film Black Panther, in which the fictional nation of Wakanda sports a transit ecosystem so good that its citizens don’t even seem to notice it, let alone need to scaffold their daily lives around it. With the upcoming release of Wakanda Forever, the Black Panther sequel due out November 11th, it’s worth revisiting what made mobility in Wakanda a vision worth holding on to.
Airships, maglev streetcars, hyperloops, waterbuses, driverless cars and planes—all of these make cameos in the film. Notably, none of these mobility technologies is unheard-of, or even new. For example, the maglev train was conceived at the turn of the 20th century, and was first built back in the 1980s. Many of Wakanda’s “sci-fi” technologies are on our very real horizon; autonomous vehicles, flying taxis, and delivery robots will soon be elbowing into an already-crowded public right-of-way (PROW).
Part of what makes Wakanda feel real is that its PROW is crowded too. Streetcars navigate narrow, naked streets carefully enough to not pose a danger to throngs of pedestrians. Multiple modes have vertical travel capabilities, meaning that airspace is already an established part of its PROW. (Private cars are only conspicuous in their absence—the one quality that seems just a bit too futuristic). But what’s remarkable is that, despite such a proliferation of people and modes, vehicle congestion in Wakanda doesn’t seem to be a thing.
Wakanda in Black Panther | Credit: Marvel Studios
It’s easy to chalk it all up to its sexy, ubiquitous machines. But what the film leaves invisible is the truly hard part: the policy and technological underpinnings that make such a complex PROW possible. In our headcanon, Wakanda has an underlying “digital infrastructure” that enables each mode, vehicle, and user to seamlessly interoperate, and enables their public servants to manage the PROW dynamically—otherwise the sharing of physical space would be chaotic, unsafe, and incredibly laborious to govern. Bigger than a piece of software, or even a platform, this digital infrastructure is a transportation operating system (tOS) with a common, non-proprietary set of languages and standards. Moreover, it provides a reference model that allows every stakeholder to bring out their best: governments provide policy expertise and regulatory-like guidance; the private sector gets enough runway to create new solutions and business models; and together, they build, at scale, the future of transportation.
Because Lacuna and many forward-looking transportation leaders are busy laying the groundwork for this vision of a tOS, it’s not that far away. The best pathway for bringing it to fruition is, like the maglev train, not at all novel — in fact, it’s the same strategy of public/private cooperation that enabled the internet to take such a deep and meaningful root into our lives.
Today, we’re at a crossroads. With every new mode, vehicle form factor, or technology that makes its debut in shared public spaces, the PROW becomes more complex and more difficult to effectively govern. It’s imperative that we create a digital infrastructure that allows our public servants to apply their powerful policy expertise to a dynamically-managed mobility ecosystem that’s seamless, sustainable, and accessible to every resident.
