The city of Detroit just got serious about mobility.

The hiring of veteran transportation and engineering executive Mark de la Vergne puts the city, which has historically struggled with making its residents mobile, on the front lines of the race to build a new economic reality, not just for Detroit, but for the region and state.

Before joining the city as chief of mobility, de la Vergne served as the principal of growth and innovation for traffic and transportation planning and engineering firm Sam Schwartz Consulting LLC in Chicago. There, he managed Chicago's plan for pedestrians and cycling. The pedestrian plan — which has faced significant delays — sought to create safer travel for Chicago's wealth of commuters on foot, including eliminating dedicated right-turn lanes, creating pedestrian islands, reducing one-way streets and more. The plan is part of an initiative to reach zero-traffic fatalities, including pedestrians, by 2026.

Before that, he served as principal at Land Strategies Inc.

De la Vergne is not entrenched in the automotive world. He's an outsider — which the city desperately needs to solve the mobility conundrum.

"He has a much more multimodal and broader perspective about mobility than an auto background," said Jean Redfield, president and CEO of Next Energy LLC, a Detroit-based energy and transportation business. "He's coming at this with a different experience, and that's refreshing."

Glenn Stevens, executive director of MichAuto, met with de la Vergne last week.

"This is an excellent hire," Stevens said. "With his tremendous background in mobility as a service, the city, region and state are going to gain a lot for mobility efforts."

After all, no other U.S. city faces a more critical challenge tied to mobility. While the industry of mobility is tied, locally, to autonomous cars, car-sharing services and other advancements in automotive, it's far more. The literal definition of mobility is the movement of people from place to place, or from job to job.

De la Vergne now has one of the most difficult positions in the region, yet potentially the one with the greatest impact for Detroit, and beyond.

De la Vergne did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but here is a "to-do" list to shape Detroit's future around mobility.