About us

The Center for Smart Transportation (CST) was created by Alex Lightman (MIT ’83 in Course IA, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering)  in 2016 to curate content, conduct surveys and original research, make forecasts, provide consultation and advice, and host summits and conferences related to the intersection of transportation, artificial intelligence, clean tech, global positioning systems tech, machine learning, the Internet of Things, sensors, and government policy. Major changes in transportation have always resulted in major changes in civilization, including finance, commerce, economics, crime and punishment, health, housing, and much more. Consider the changes in human history following the invention of the wheel, the stirrup, the chariot, the canoe, the boat, the ship, the train, the tank, the internal combustion engine, and the jet engine.

Innovation in transportation determines economic complexity, which, according to researchers at MIT and Harvard, determines how fast a country can grow its economy and how wealthy and productive it can be. Innovation in transportation can determine who wins or loses military battles or even World Wars. World War II was fought in many places, including North Africa and Stalingrad, over oil and the ability to keep vehicles moving. 

In 2017, we are now seeing the widespread adoption of intelligent GPS trackers that can save fuel and determine who is driving safely and on route, and who is not. We see the widespread adoption of electric vehicles from dozens of manufacturers, and of self-driving car technology by Google (valued at about $500 billion) and 30 other companies. One of these is Uber (valued at $68 billion), which paid $680 million for Ot.to (exactly 1% of its value) after only six months to create self-driving trucks and enter into the vast world of freight transportation and logistics. 

With so much happening with respect to the world of smarter cars, trucks, GPS trackers (also going onto people), it is not surprising that there are vast differences in expectations, indicating a need for a fair objective neutral source of analysis. For example, consider the difference in expectations around just one of the hundreds of areas expected to change. We all know self-driving trucks are coming, but when will they be here sufficiently developed to cause net job loss of more than 20% of the current jobs done by human truck drivers? Silicon Valley investors might say two to four years, while truck drivers might say 20 to 40 years. There is almost nowhere else where people exposed to similar news can come to conclusions that are ten times faster or slower than others. 

Thus, the CST has been created with the intention of THOUGHT LEADERSHIP, to marshall the facts, figures, examples, and full 360 view of reality, and then transfer this whole picture so the better decisions can be made by drivers, manufacturers, investors, government officials and relevant other stakeholders and decision makers at the local, regional, national and global level.

We will start by writing weekly blogs around the implications of intelligent GPS trackers, based on the CST’s open access to Founding Sponsor Cartrack, a publicly traded manufacturer and operator of over 600,000 GPS trackers in 23 countries. As additional sponsors are found, we will add, first, blogs in the areas we can obtain relevant information in, and then white papers, then forecasts, then corporate and executive briefings, and finally conferences and summits in cities around the world. 

Our aims are ambitious, especially based on simple objectives at the onset, but founder Alex Lightman has “seen this movie before”, with the changes in the Internet. He created a similar organization that ended up providing virtually all these information products, services and events for the New Internet, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Events included IPv6 Summits for the US government that hosted the Congressman who chaired the powerful Government Reform Committee (Now Oversight and Government Reform Committee), the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIOs or CTOs of the most powerful government agencies and largest technology corporations. One result of the IPv6 Summits was to write an essay about why the US government should mandate IPv6 that led to a hearing in Congress, “To Lead or Follow” about Internet Leadership that ended an effort by China, Japan and the Republic of Korea to create their own breakaway Internet standard because the US government mandated IPv6 ready status for all government software projects. 

The CST will be created based on a similar framework of providing the right information at the right time in the right format to enable decision makers to save time and money and to be able to better recognize and seize unique opportunities for improving transportation, while meeting the needs of all relevant stakeholders.