Ten Commandments, One Question: What Kind of Transport System Are We Building?

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Every few weeks, a new milestone resets the mobility conversation. A bigger funding round, another robotaxi city, a more capable model. The pace is real, and it is tempting to read all that motion as progress. But a transport system is not the sum of its newest technologies. It is the sum of the choices a city makes about who it moves, how, and why.

That is the quiet provocation in the “10 Commandments of Transport,” a list circulating among transport leaders lately (credit to Russell King). Not one of the ten names a technology. Every one names a principle. Read together, they pull the debate back from what cities can build toward what they should build.

So, before discussing the next pilot, the next procurement, the next demo that promises to change everything, let us first ask a basic question: what kind of transport system are we actually trying to build? Below we present each transport principle and propose what we believe it means in practice.

1. Put people before vehicles.

When a city plans a street, it first has to decide what “success” means. Beyond the initial goal of providing smooth access from here to there, it evolved into a question of how many cars could get through, so lanes were widened, lights were timed for traffic, and curb space went to parking. This principle says to change the measure: count the people who reach their destination, not the vehicles that pass. It matters because those two goals pull in opposite directions. The same strip of road moves very different numbers of people depending on how it is used. By NACTO’s street-design standards, a regular traffic lane carries on the order of 600 to 1,600 people an hour, while the same lane run as a dedicated bus lane can carry up to 8,000. Same width, same street, a very different result. We discussed this at length in a previous Imagry newsletter The Hidden Cost of Private Vehicle Use, which added up the subsidies and hidden costs that keep car travel looking less expensive than it really is.

2. Design for everyone, not just those who can or want to drive.

It is easy to design a system around the average driver and assume everyone else will manage. But a large part of the population cannot drive or chooses not to: children, many older people, people with disabilities, people who cannot afford a car. When a system really only works from behind the wheel, all of those populations mentioned above end up with poorer access to jobs, school, and care. The numbers are bigger than you might expect: in the US, about one-third of residents do not hold a driver’s license, roughly one in ten rarely or never drive, and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study counted around 15 million adults without reliable transportation. Designing for everyone means treating those people as the test of the system, not the exception to it. We looked at why public transport, the most inclusive option that most cities already have, still ends up so underused in a previous Imagry newsletter. For answers, check it out: Why Is Public Transport Still Struggling?

3. Transport is full of unintended consequences.

Transport decisions rarely stay inside the lines drawn for them. A change meant to fix one problem tends to set off others for which nobody planned. The clearest example is what happens when a city adds road capacity to ease congestion: the extra space makes driving a little easier, so more people drive, and the road becomes jammed again. The lesson is not to stop acting, but to expect the ripples and plan for them, because they can run in good directions too. Better transit, for instance, does more than move people; it improves air quality, safety, and public health across a whole population. We look at that knock-on effect in a previous Imagry newsletter entitled Improve Public Health with Autonomous Transit.

4. Manage demand.

Most congestion gets treated as a supply problem: not enough lanes, not enough capacity, so build more. This principle pushes back on that instinct. You can rarely build your way out of congestion, because more capacity tends to invite more traffic to fill it. The more durable approach is to manage the demand itself: shaping when people travel, how they travel, and whether a given trip needs to happen at all, through tools like pricing, better scheduling, and genuinely good alternatives. It is also what keeps a system affordable, since using existing capacity well costs far less than pouring new concrete.

5. Keep your assets in a good state of repair.

New projects get the ribbon-cuttings, but the quieter work of maintaining what already exists usually delivers more. A network of buses only earns trust if it runs reliably, and reliability comes from upkeep. When maintenance is deferred to free up money for something flashier, the cost does not disappear; it compounds, as breakdowns and delays pile up until riders stop counting on the service and drift away. Keeping assets in good repair is unglamorous, but it is often the highest-return investment a system can make.

6. Integrate transport and land use.

Where people live, work, shop, and go to school decides what transport they will need, yet these decisions are usually planned by different people at different times. When housing is built far from any transit, or a new line runs through places nobody needs to reach, the result is infrastructure that is either ignored or overwhelmed on day one. Integrating transport and land use means making those two decisions together, so the way a place is built and the way people move through it fit each other instead of working against each other. It is also where autonomy starts to matter as a planning tool and not just a transport one: shared self-driving fleets can shrink the land a city gives over to parking and roads, freeing it for housing and green space. We make that case in a previous Imagry newsletter entitled Designing Cities for People: Autonomy as a Land-Use Strategy.

7. Decide what you want, then regulate and provide to achieve it.

It is tempting to start with an exciting technology and then go looking for a way to use it. This approach is backward. Cities should first decide what they want to achieve (better access, lower emissions, fewer crashes, etc.) and then choose and shape the tools to get them there. With this approach, technology serves a clear goal; in reverse, cities end up bending their goals to fit whatever happens to be on offer. The “regulate and provide” activities rely heavily on government; these are the pilots, permits, and standards that decide how fast good options reach the road. We look at that role in an Imagry article entitled The Role of Government and Policy in Shaping Autonomous Transit.

8. Be bold. Change has to overcome status quo bias.

Every transport system has a default way of doing things, and defaults are sticky. People and institutions organize their budgets and habits around the current setup, so even a clearly better option meets resistance simply because it is new. That is why meaningful change usually requires a deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable decision as opposed to waiting for everyone to agree. It also explains a pattern we see constantly: the technology is ready, but the city stalls. We looked at why that happens in a previous Imagry newsletter entitled: What’s Really Holding Mobility Innovation Back?

9. Integrate between different modes.

No single mode, not the bus, the train, the bike, or the shuttle, solves a city’s mobility challenges on its own. What makes a system work is how well those modes interconnect, so that one trip can flow from a shuttle to a train to a short walk without friction. This is also where a lot of the future value sits. A McKinsey & Company report projects shared mobility spending could reach 500 billion to 1 trillion dollars by 2030 and frames on-demand shared services as a complement to public transport, feeding rail and metro rather than competing with them. The ITF – International Transport Forum at the OECD found that used this way, as feeders, shared services can raise rail and metro ridership by up to 23 percent. We covered how autonomy fits into that connected picture in a previous Imagry newsletter entitled: How Autonomy Completes the MaaS Vision.

10. Do not fall for shiny technology or solutions.

This is the principle most worth pinning above the desk in this industry. The test for any new technology is simple: what problem does it actually solve? Right now a lot of money is failing that test, flowing into robotaxis that mostly recreate a private car ride in a handful of dense cities. Waymo recently raised 16 billion dollars at a 126 billion dollar valuation, and Uber has signaled more than 10 billion dollars in robotaxi commitments. Meanwhile the problem cities genuinely have goes unaddressed: Europe is already short around 105,000 bus and coach drivers, a gap heading toward 275,000 by 2028, with more than half of today’s bus and tram drivers due to retire within fifteen years. Autonomy aimed at that shortage is useful. Autonomy aimed at the headline is just shiny. We argued this in full in a previous Imagry newsletter entitled: Rethinking Autonomy.

🚍 Imagry’s Approach: Technology that Serves the System

Read together, the ten commandments point to something very specific: shared, scheduled, high-occupancy transport that serves everyone and connects to everything else. That is where autonomy delivers the most, and where Imagry | Autonomous Driving solutions operate.

• AI-based, HD-mapless autonomy. Our system runs on real-time, vision-based perception, with no dependency on HD maps, LiDAR, cloud connectivity, or infrastructure changes. Deployment is faster and far less costly to scale from one city to the next.
• Location-independent by design. The same software stack operates across buses and shuttles, in left- and right-hand-drive markets, with deployments across Europe, Israel, U.S., and Japan.
• Built for public transport use cases. The platform is optimized for predictable, high-frequency service: supporting human-driven fleets at peak hours, shuttling people across medical, university, and industrial campuses, and closing first and last mile gaps to transit hubs.
• Proven in the real world. Imagry has been operating autonomous buses on public roads since 2023, and is the first company in the world to achieve an NCAP safety rating and comply with the UN-R155 cybersecurity regulation for autonomous buses.

The technology question is real, and it is moving fast. But it comes second. First, decide what kind of system you are trying to build. Then choose the technology that serves it.

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Video Spotlight

At the European AV Summit in London, Imagry CEO Eran Ofir was invited to share the company’s real-world experience deploying autonomous public transportation solutions on public roads. Watch this video to learn how Imagry is bringing real-world autonomy to public transport for M3 / M2 / M1 category vehicles.

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