Access to mobility improves lives, says Glydways founder

Imagine zipping to work in your own private rolling pod while drinking coffee, working on your laptop or just relaxing. Mark Seeger, the founder of the San Francisco-based company Glydways, imagined it too and he and his team are well on their way to making such travel a reality.

Glydways is building a multimillion-dollar micro-transit network that would complement current bus and rail services in East Contra Costa County. It could be fully operational by as early as 2027. The company is working on other projects, as well.

Customers would hail cars through a phone app or from kiosks along the 28-mile route and hop on board at one of the more than 50 boarding locations planned between the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station and downtown Brentwood.

The small driverless electric cars are expected to initially operate along paved pathways, with wait times lasting seconds, not minutes. We talked to Seeger about his on-demand mobility dream and where he got his inspiration. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Glydways?

A: I was born in Holland and I lived there until I was 13 years old and then moved back to the USA to New Hampshire, where I lived and went to school in upstate New York at Rensselaer Poly Tech Institute. Then I moved to Singapore, where I lived for 10 years, before I returned to the states.

Growing up in three different parts of the world allowed me to really see and experience what it’s like to live in parts of the world where you have great access to public transit and where you don’t. I could see the differences in front of my eyes. There are people who don’t have access to affordable housing or have affordable housing but don’t have access to employment because they can’t get there. I asked myself the question — why do some cities have mass transit and others don’t? I realized a couple shocking things. Roughly speaking, there are about 5,000 cities on Earth that need mass transit but only 178 cities have a mass transit system.

I care about equity of opportunity. I learned through living in different parts of the world that access to mobility is access to opportunity. Access to mobility gets you access to jobs, access to affordable housing and access to education. All those things add value to someone’s life.

Q: What has been the general reaction from the public about the Glydways project?

A: I would say there are two buckets. The first bucket is when we explain Glydways to the average person — not the transit agencies, just people on the street. We are presenting our vision of your daily commute. Our vision of your daily commute is you get your own vehicle, on demand, private, point-to-point, consistent, non-stop, 24/7 for the same price as sitting on BART or on a bus. Generally the response we get as a team is, “Boy, I can’t wait to get that in my city or my neighborhood.”

When you then talk to the transit agency people — the people who are in charge of building these things, running these things, implementing these things — the first question is, “You do the same thing that a train does but at one-tenth the cost with a better experience? That sounds really good. It almost sounds too good to be true. Prove it.”

The reason the proving is so important is it’s not just that big claims require big proof — that’s true for anything. But we are saying it’s not just one-tenth the cost to build, there is also no subsidy and our partners are willing to finance some or even all the cost so you might even get it for free. People will say, “I love it but I need to see it.” When we take them through that, the receptivity is great. We’ve never had a city come to us and say, “Now that I’ve seen it, I don’t want it.”

Q: What do you say to the skeptics?

A: The skeptics will say, “I don’t think you can do it.” I say three things. Number one: Whether we make it or not, what we are doing is trying to make the world a better place. Do we not agree that more public transit that serves more people is a better thing? Number two: The burden of proof is on me and on my company and my partnerships to prove it. We will either succeed or we will fail, but it’s not your problem, it’s ours. That’s how our economy works. Number three: If I do make it work, wouldn’t you want to try it? And people always say, “Of course.”

Q: You talk about mobility bringing access to opportunities. What does that mean, exactly?

A: Economics teaches you that moving labor and goods creates economic value. That’s at the macro level. At the micro level, think about the Bay Area, where we have a housing crisis. The jobs are all on the Peninsula, largely speaking, but the affordable housing isn’t. If I live in East Contra Costa County, where there is affordable housing, but I have to travel two to three hours to get to my job because of traffic congestion, I don’t really have access to those employment opportunities. So that’s another way of saying access to mobility gives me access to jobs, affordable housing, education, commerce, all of those things.

The more ways we give people more access to seamless, cheap, reliable and safe mobility, the more opportunities they have to better themselves economically or socially. Opportunity requires mobility.