20-Year Prospect

20-Year Prospect

Scotty may beam you up sometime in the future, but not in the next twenty years. Until people are able to teleport, they will always need transportation and that's good news for bus drivers. The question is: Will the experience be the same?

From the time that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus until now, very little has changed about bus commuting. Choose your line, wait at the stop, board the bus, exit the bus, repeat going in the opposite direction. The electronics company, Philips, has some George Jetson-like ideas about re-thinking the entire system—beginning with the bus stop.

Just like videocassettes, bus stops as we know them may cease to exist. (Source)

Imagine this. You have an app that connects you with other passengers going your way. You meet up, not at a fixed bus stop, but at a street light that glows in different colors to let passengers and the bus driver know that, due to popular demand, the light is now a bus stop. When the bus driver gets the signal, he responds in real time and takes passengers to their destinations (source). 

We can leave it to Philips and the transit companies to work out all the crazy details. If they do, you may have the opportunity to step out of the past and into the future as a techno-bus driver.