Applying Systems Thinking to Ride Sharing

In my lastest presentation, Zhenni and I explored ride sharing such as Uber and Lyft in smart city. We approached this problem with Soft Systems Methodology.

So why use Soft Systems Methodology?

• Because this situation is messy. It’s complex, dynamic, social, and political.

• We need to focus on identifying the problem. In our presentation, we will try to unfold “What are we doing and why?” “Where should we be heading?” “What relationship should we maintain with different stakeholders?”

• Effective problem solving requires a group of participants from within the organization to generate ideas and reach accomodations for the future.

Drawing the Rich Picture.

We began by drawing the Rich Picture that represent our problem situation. We thought about who’s involved and what problems that they would identify. Beginning with ride sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft, we have uber drivers, riders. There is TTC and Taxi companies who are impacted. Followed by government and environmental interventions. We included some quotes.

Some issues that we identified are:

• Unreliability, inefficiency, and crowdedness of public transportation perceived by riders. This problematic situation is causing TTC to lose riders and increase ride sharing users. Consequently, there are more cars on the road. So then, there is increase in congestion, pollution and carbon emission.

• There is shifting market that is putting public transportation and Taxi at risk.

Based on our Rich Picture, we will show two perspectives: public transportation system and sustainability management system. Certainly, there are several other systems that we could have considered.

This is a conceptual model of Public Transportation System. Based on the Checkland reading, we put together activities needed to describe the transformation process, which is to reduce road congestion through reliable, economical and accessible public transit alternatives to Uber and Lyft.

Based on the conceptual model, we compared it with the real world. Ideally, this would be done collaboratively with more stakeholders to bring diverse views. This was based on our research on TTC’s annual report so this may be of a limited perspective.

To conclude, we proposed two actions that are desirable and feasible that may be a discussion point amongst stakeholders.

1. Build more subway station exits for busiest stations (i.e., Dundas, Queen) & make the underground paths as only walkways for pedestrians to cross main intersections.

2. Implement transit control that prioritize above ground public transit, in particular street cars, through no-street parking and limit turns at intersections at streets with streetcars.

Sounds familiar? That's right! It's the King Street Pilot project which just became official now!