Today's workshop was really interesting. We split up into small groups and each chose one of five problems to brainstorm and present a solution to. We chose "Private vs. Shared Ownership" with respect to personal transportation, and how we can reduce congestion, emissions, etc.
The strategy was to focus on two groups of people:
1) those who own and need their own car
2) those who occasionaly need a car, but don't need to own one.
For the first group, we thought of ways to encourage increased ridership and enable sharing. To increase ridership , regulations and incentives could be used to discourage "one car, one driver" trips, such as charging downtown congestions fees only if there's one person in the car. Other ways could be higher taxes on owning more than one car, to try and reduce the total number of cars.
To enable sharing, we had to touch on one of the other 5 problems, "Mobility on Demand." The idea is to have a web-based application, which could work on a mobile phone, to connect people willing to give rides with people who need a ride. People using the system would have to register before, to make it more secure, and those offering rides would receive some payment from those getting the ride. These kinds of websites already exist for longer journeys (http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/), but for short inner-city trips, the system would have to work quite spontaneously. Using GPS and voice recognition, however, it could work quite seamlessly. Here's a basic scenario:
- someone decides to head downtown and wonders if anyone nearby using the system needs a ride. They open the app and speaks into the phone: "going downtown in 5 minutes." The system tries to match them with someone who requested a ride downtown recently. If someone is close enough, both people are notified and asked to confirm. The driver gets in the car and the navigation system guides them to the other person's location. At the destination, the passenger just leaves the car right away, since the payment was automatic, based on the distance driven.
After describing this, it still seems hard to imagine a lot of car owners using it. Maybe that's just in "western" countries though. In Russia, for example, it's very common to hitchhike in cities - usually some driver will stop for you quite soon on a busy street. Then you see if you're going the same way and negotiate a price. The web-application is just a high-tech version of this.
To address the 2nd group of people, there could be a "city bike" system with cars, i.e. a fleet of cars that you can use on demand in a city. I read about such a service called Car2Go, a subsidiary of Daimler, that started in Ulm, Germany (http://www.car2go.com). In this system there is a fleet of, say, Smart cars distributed in a city. They could be left parked anywhere, or there could be designated locations. You have to register to use them, then you could just take one whenever you need it, if you see one that's available, or perhaps you could also reserve it. When you're done, you again just park it anywhere or at a designated place. You get billed automatically based on how far you drove or how long you had it. Basically it's a simpler and more flexible car rental scheme.
One of the other groups discussed the "transportation system of the future." They had a good idea based on autonomous taxis - small vehicles that can take up to 5 people. To get one, you wait at a bus stop and press a button. During busy hours, long streams of vehicles could come to pick people up. During off hours, you might have to wait a little while. The autonomous driving would be aided by embedding magnetic bolts into the ashphalt which sensors on the vehicles can detect.
I think this is a great idea, and somehow I feel that something like this will develop. I remember reading how proponents of autonomous vehicles point out that they are able to drive much closer to each other than with human drivers, increasing the capacity of current roads - traffic could flow much smoother. This is a key aspect of the system - that it uses our current infrastructure. Another excellent point is that privacy is not compromised. It's more like a taxi than a bus, and people have their own vehicle during their ride, making people more likely to use it. I think the magnetic bolts might not even be necessary, as GPS, on-board radars, cameras, laser scanners and intelligent software might be enough to drive autonomously. Google has actually been testing such a car recently (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html).
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