Dan's posterous

Mega-Jammed Mexico City

How are world mega cities planning for their mobility future?  Here are comments from Bernardo Baranda, director of Latin American Policy Institute for Transportation and Development - translated by Google and myself:

Come functionality second floor 5 years - Which I think means you could create a second "floor" of transportation, a second level of roads and highways and that it would be just as full and congested in only 5 years if we continue with the private automobile paradigm.

Says Bernardo Baranda, director Latin American Policy Institute for Transportation and Development to the second floor so crowded cities are not works that will have a horizon of functionality

Mexico City | Tuesday, February 1, 2011 Rafael Montes |

The second floor of the roads constructed in the Federal District would be functional only for five years, then do not.

This was realized by Bernardo Baranda, Latin American director of the Institute for Transportation Policy and Development Programme (ITDP), who said the second floor in a city as congested as that of Mexico, there are works that will have a horizon of functionality .

"After five years, these works generally tend to stabilize the traffic it had before."

Exemplified by the construction of second floor is like trying to solve the problem of overweight, instead of dieting, buying loose clothes. "

Facing an environmental crisis like the one he now lives, said Bernardo Baranda, the second floor only promote greater use of the car and "in reality, it will consume more liters of gasoline."

"We believe the medium and long term is not building more roads, but to improve public transport and people have options beyond the car."

This is considered a specialist in urban mobility during a tour before the opening of the exhibition "Our cities, our future," which has a projection to 2030 sustainable scenario for ten of the most troubled cities and populated the world, if they were planned based on the needs of the people, not cars.

"The 2030 seems to us a horizon far enough to be able to plan things and really change things structurally, yet is close enough to make them look all the fruits of that vision that we share, I hope we play live in 2030" , Baranda said at the Franz Mayer Museum, where it will be an exhibition sponsored by the group carrier ADO.

In an interview, the director of ITDP considered that at present, with the construction of more roads, "the message is sent is 'what should I try to have a car so I can move efficiently,'" when in fact what should be to promote the discouraging private car use.

Presenting w/ Dean Kamen

I thought this was a good article on the need to reform urban mobility.  I enjoyed being with Dean Kamen in Detroit at the Creative Cities 2.0 conference.  This article was published in the Capital Gains newspaper (Lansing Michigan).


Transformational Transportation

By: Brad Garmon 10/22/2008

Both Dean Kamen and Dan Sturges approach transportation technology as a bridge to a different kind of future.

Sturges worked briefly as a car designer at General Motors before starting his own company with a new class of mini-cars known as Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs). The company went bankrupt, but you might have seen Sturges’ design lately under the name GEM, now sold under a Chrysler subsidiary.

Kamen is in the Inventors Hall of Fame and holds more than 500 patents, according to Jean Jennings, editor of Automobile Magazine in Ann Arbor—including the insulin injection system for diabetics and the cool (if not yet widely embraced) Segway Personal Transporter.

The two spoke together at the recent Creative Cities 2.0 Summit in Detroit, focusing on the role of transportation in urban revitalization.

Transport and the City

“The one thing that threatens the survival of cities is our transportation system,” Kamen told the roomful of leaders, advocates and planners in Detroit. “Cities have survived for thousands of years. They survived the bubonic plague.”

But the threat represented by our current transportation system is different, says Kamen, because it was built to ensure that everybody could leave the city.

“The goal in life was to get out of the city,” he says of the country’s auto-based transportation push. “It worked.” Eyeing the group, he laments: “You’re like a bunch of orphans who killed your parents and now you want sympathy.”

The average speed of a car in America’s cities is three miles an hour, Kamen says. “No one likes to drive cars in a downtown, congested city anyway—not  even the people who build them.” The problem isn’t one of transportation technology, Kamen suggests. It’s just that we keep using the same technology to meet all our transportation needs.

He uses air travel as an example, pointing out that we don’t fly to Seattle and then maneuver the jet plane to our final destination in town. “It’s beautifully optimized machine to do its job,” he says, but suggests that know it's best to “leave the airplane at the airport.”

The same thinking, he says, should apply to the automobile.

It’s a beautifully optimized machine for certain travel. But Kamen suggests that for cities—particularly for destinations closer than about six miles—there are much better alternatives.

“We’ve crippled [our cities] by putting a bull in the china shop and expecting it to be polite,” says Kamen. “We want to make cities attractive, and get businesses, and make them clean and sustainable—none of the goals of putting cars in our cities are consistent with that.”

“Make your cities attractive and fun. Think big thoughts,” Kamen admonishes. “It’s not a lack of technology; it’s a lack of vision and willingness to give up the past.”

Nobility of Mobility

Cars “become urban furniture under the ownership model,” agrees Sturges: big, pricey things that just sit around most all of the time, taking up valuable space and getting in our way.

Sturges now leads Intrago—a start-up that melds Web connectivity with available-on-demand electric vehicles.

He calculates that automobile ownership costs us each of us an average of $23 a day—$46 a day if you have two cars at home.

“If you think your cell phone bill is high, just imagine marking your calendar with that bill every day,” he says. “$46, $46, $46. . . .”

For Sturges, the question is simple: “How do we solve our overall transportation issue?”

So far, it appears, the answers coming from Detroit have been too narrow.

Even “if everyone is in a [plug-in hybrid electric] Chevy Volt, you still have congestion,” he says. “You still have machines built for five people carrying only one, always carrying only 20 percent of their load capacity."

"We [still] have one car for all jobs.”

The alternative, suggests Sturges, is offering multiple transportation tools on a need-to-use basis.

He calls it micro-rental: a stable of small, on-demand vehicles—electric bicycles and scooters, NEVs, carsharing options like Zip Car—throughout a city, connected to the Web and integrating you with mass transit and the ever-present option of (gasp!) walking.

That way, using your PDA, you can always rent the right vehicle for the distance, just when you need it—and the things don’t sit around and suck up your money and space when you don’t.

“We’re talking about different vehicles for different trips—the right tool for the job,” he says.

The idea is starting to catch on. Sturges' pilot projects using this approach to close the “last mile” gap to mass transit earned Sturges some YouTube notoriety out west.

And Ingham County Treasurer Eric Schertzing is trying to figure out ways to make transportation central to Lansing’s neighborhood revitalization discussion.

“At least in my experience, the trap is that transportation is an undisclosed topic when you look at neighborhood redevelopment,” says Schertzing who attended the transportation session in Detroit. “This is just a tremendous opportunity for us to recognize the strengths and build on them.”

Transportation Transformation

This won't happen overnight. Kamen and Sturges are not thinking of the transportation end game; they’re designing for the next game—the transformative piece that frees us—at least mentally—from our fixation on the one-hammer-for-all-nails world of the full-size automobile.

But it’s not only about mobility; it’s also about energy. According to a recent article in CNN’s Business 2.0 magazine, Kamen has spent more than $40 million developing a clean-burning Stirling engine that can tap fuel sources from gasoline to restaurant grease.

He’s working on putting one into a small, electric car called the Think City—described as a “rolling iPod”—extending its range and hopefully jumpstarting a distributed network of mobile home-based power stations.

"If you have enough Thinks out there, you would literally change the architecture of the grid," Kamen told Business 2.0 in 2007.

“Society doesn’t like to change,” Kamen says simply. “No industry has grown as big as autos. It’s going to take a long time to change.”

But for both innovators, it’s fundamentally about “finding some acceptable transition to go from the old thing to the new thing,” says Kamen; it’s about getting to point we “stop thinking about a 22-foot long, 3,000 pound vehicle as the only option for the very common distances.”

The car created the urban form we’re dealing with—it was a transformative technology,” says Sturges. “In the digital age, we can do that again.”

Suburban Milk - Only 1 Block Away! (tonight's idea):

Thincity

Automated vending machines are a growing business and in the suburbs where everything is a drive away -- why not having a mini (robotic) 7-11 in the middle of every suburban block.  And in this economy, seems lots of folks would rent their driveway to house a car-looking food + drink kiosk.  It would be nice to know you could always run out and get one of those main staples on the neighbor's (or your) driveway. Just an idea, but it seems to have a lot of merit.  But then it's 11:45P (rapID 1.0hr)

* designing (+sharing) like the wurld is in trouble