Didi Chuxing's Jean Liu on The Future of Cities

Good afternoon everyone, it's great to join this event and to be back in New York. Today's topic is about future city, and every time when I come to New York, I instantly feel the connection with the city, the vibe, the energy, and the possibilities of this amazing city. I think for everyone there's one city that touches us so deeply. For me, that city is Beijing. Actually, there this is the Beijing if you can look in the photo, that's the Beijing when I grew up. As you can see, back then horses were part of the transportation, and sometimes even mules. And I've seen how mules, and this is the Beijing now. You can see it's a completely different city, it's so modern. And thanks to all the city planners and beauties, now a lot of major global cities have been transformed to a whole new different level, and more people want to move into cities. Our cities become bigger and taller and brighter, but at the same time, we fear the city has less time and space for people. I don't know about you, but a lot of times I find myself anxious, and I know a lot of people feel anxious when you're living in the big city. We fear we get stuck in, you know, some jammed road even when there's no event. And we feel anxious when we watch our kids playing in polluted air. And sometimes the anxiety is so strong, we feel we lost connection with ourselves. And since we are talking about future city, in my mind, future city should empower people rather than stressing us out. It should empower us, our children, our children's children. And we should have more space for trees and water, and it should be built around people, not machines. So how do you achieve that? How can a city support a growing population well at the same time remain friendly on time and space and sustainability? If everyone in this world wants to adopt a lifestyle of urban lifestyle like here, I'm sure we will have a more severe climate issue like we just talked about. So how do we achieve it? I agree with all the speakers today. Every one of us, we just need to step up, we need to make our own contribution. East-west, public-private, academic-business, bigger companies, smaller companies. While there's a scientist trying to send us to Mars, trying to build underground tunnels, there are young companies who are trying to make smaller steps that's changing the city bit by bit. And we are one of those young companies.

So this is for those of you who may not know us. DiDi is a company. We're based in China, providing mobility service, and our mission is to provide a more affordable, comfortable, and more efficient mobility service to everyone. I mean everyone. Three years ago, there is this young talented woman engineer who walked into my office to resign. I asked her why. She said she absolutely loved the job, but because she recently got pregnant, she just cannot afford to spend three hours every day switching between buses and subways. The commute was killing her. Cases like that are our motivations. There are 800 million urban Chinese that travel 0.4 billion times every day, and you can imagine there are a lot of cases like this. And in our view, nobody should give up their dream because of a commute issue. However, we do have another issue in China, which is car ownership. Car ownership just cannot grow higher. It's not like here in the states. In China, we do not have enough space for more cars.

That's why we're trying our best to provide a series of products as you can see from this slide. Not just ride sharing, private car ride sharing. In addition to that, we provide intelligent taxi system, intelligent minibus system, carpooling, bike share. So we are trying all means to provide services to all urban Chinese, and we have strong conviction in that. 25 million rides take place on DiDi every day, which is twice as many as the other markets add up worldwide. And we see very encouraging result coming out of these efforts. There are 17 million drivers that earn income from DiDi's platform last year. 20 cities are working with us to completely redesign their traffic signal and vehicle lanes. And in the test zone, as you can see, we've already seen congestion time reduced by 20 to 40 percent after only three months of work. And also, the deep learning technology allows us to put more people into fewer cars. So 4 million passengers use our carpool products every day, and that alone takes away millions of tons of carbon emission every year off the road. And technology also saves lives. Globally, the road mortality rate is 1.6 deaths per hundred million miles. 1.6. And by adopting the neural safe drive technology on DiDi's platform, that number got lowered to 0.6 per hundred million miles. And lastly, the whole ride share network is completely redefining the car industry. The next generation of cars will become greener. As a matter of fact, we are already running the largest electric vehicle fleet worldwide, and the number is growing very, very strong.

But this is just the beginning. And we know how massive, how difficult this problem we're all facing together. That's why we remind ourselves every day we need to work harder and we need to collaborate with as many people as possible. That's why we have invested in seven leading players around the globe in the ride share industry, from Southeast Asia to Middle East, from Europe to Latin America to United States. And we believe in sharing. We think sharing the best practices, sharing the best product knowledge will make our industry grow faster, and that can benefit more people around the globe. And this is only our mobility.

If we look beyond the mobility, there's a very long list of complicated questions when we think about future cities. How do we think about overall efficiency with individual requests? How do we really fight poverty when there are more people coming into cities? How do we prepare ourselves for autonomous era? We don't have perfect answers, but I think that's the point of an event like this. So all of us sit together and think about what's the best solution. I am very hopeful. I think if everyone steps up and contributes, one day we'll be able to convert more motorways and parking lots into parks and schools. And one day we may find inner peace even living in the busiest city in this world. And one day we will give cities back to people. And I look forward to working towards that direction with you all. Thank you very much.