IMAGINE for a minute you are a 10-year-old child in a village in South-east Asia, where there are 100 houses and 500 people. Your parents, like most other folk in the village, are rice farmers. You yourself will probably grow up to farm and will typically reside in the same village. All this could be true, if the above was written any time between the 1500s and the early 1980s. Now imagine you are that same child right now; by the time you are 20 years old in 2030, three out of 10 people in your village, you among them, will have moved to the city, and will be working in an office. You will regularly use public transport and other mobility platforms to go to work and will increasingly have goods delivered to your door. As you enter the frequently packed metro railway system to avoid the street traffic, you ponder whether the city's infrastructure and services are prepared for the rapid change that you see around you.

This scenario is fast becoming daily reality for tens of millions of people. Ninety million people in South-east Asia are expected to move to urban areas by 2030 at rates which dwarf the European Industrial Revolution urbanisation. At the same time, 80 million households are beginning to make discretionary purchases, signalling the dawn of a new middle class - which is expected to double by 2030.

These changes, and the emerging mobility needs that they imply, will put cities and their transportation systems and planning to the test. As the 2020s dawn, urban/transport planners and policymakers can reflect on what future cities could look like, in order to deal with this unprecedented change in demand for movement of people and goods. Tell-tale signs of this future exist in currently observable mobility trends in most metropolitan environments. The most pronounced changes in mobility are being fuelled by three key technology-driven disruptive trends: the proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs), the emergence of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and development and adaptation of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS).