Transport innovator Jeral Poskey reflects on his extraordinary career journey – from rural Texas and Washington DC, to Stanford and Silicon Valley – and explains his passion for better connecting cities and communities.

In this episode, Swyft Cities CEO Jeral Poskey explains how he turned his personal passion for transport into a formidable career.

While at Google’s real estate division, Jeral began a plan to get people to work conveniently which, in turn, helped the company get the green light to build more office space. “That’s when the light bulb went off for our leadership,” he recalls. “Solving these transportation problems allows you to print more land – and in Silicon Valley, that’s printing money. So now we could come up with all sorts of crazy transportation ideas and [attribute] a return on investment to them.”

At that point, transportation became strategic for Google, explains Jeral. “It wasn’t just an employee service any more it was a strategic element in Google’s real estate plans and office plans … The mandate was there to find a [transport] solution, prove a return on investment, and then make it happen.”

After a process of testing and learning, Jeral and his colleagues introduced smart gondolas with autonomous cabins that travel on fixed cables – moving passengers at a lower cost per mile with fewer carbon emissions than conventional transport alternatives. Jeral and the core team have since left Google and, with Swyft Cities, they are in the process of bringing their innovative mobility to public and private real estate projects across the globe.

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