Quest for optimum mobility and the future of civilization

All too often conventional mass transit serves as just another place that people have to get to and from without suitable transportation.

 

Overview of ideal vehicles 

On a fundamental level, relative motion is essential for perception and as rapid saccadic eye motion is necessary for vision translating to similar dynamics likely crucial to higher cognitive processes, mobility is way up there next to intelligence driving human development.

High Concept:  Catch-and-Release Blimp transport

(Mitchell Joachim)

As mobile ecosystems comprised of trillions of biological nano machines it is incomprehensible how long it will take for human intelligence to proxy the richness, resilience, pure functionality and practicality of natural systems.  Human mobility is a product of many years evolution.  Self-propulsion is ubiquitous among living things and  serves as the gold standard.  And, as the ultimate philanthropist providing extraordinary bounty free, nature has had a lot of years to figure this stuff out.  Add a little bit of human intelligence and the simple mechanical advantage provided by bicycle-like technology increases mobility tremendously. 

Challenge Concept and Alize trikes

Adding a little bit more in the form of external power on the scale of human power generation, greatly increases the ease-of-use, speed, and range of these mobility amplification machines.  Most likely, the upper limit of the external power required to create practical and optimum mobility devices is on the scale that elite athletes can generate, something like 1,500 watts or about 2 horsepower for brief moments to slowly overcome inertial and accelerating turbulence and frictional forces to produce speeds in excess of 80 miles per hour.  In this case, more is less.

Supersizing and overpowering are normally not necessary in the proper designing of transportation and are about other things more often than not making transportation difficult, dangerous, and wasteful.

 

A folded Challenge Alize can fit inside back of the pictured Smart Car

At 20 mph constant speed Phileas Fogg could have made his trip around the world in half of eighty days.  Ivan Illich, "Tools for Conviviality" page 88, 1973

There are huge differences in systems that have to accommodate a few hundred pounds at a time than ones that have to accommodate 55 tons.  Guess which ones are easier to design, cost a lot less, and work a lot better?

One way to substantially reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) is the broad implementation of vehicles that produce virtually no emissions and require minimal energy amounts, both sufficiently far below averages for vehicles captured by the VMT metric to be considered negligible and allowing them to be called ideal vehicles. Completely human-powered vehicles such as bicycles fit in this category, as well as hybrid human-electric vehicles such as the Aerorider pictured below.  Since cyclists go about three to four times faster than pedestrians with comparable improvements in energy efficiencies and reduced emissions, when bicycles are used for many of the trips taken by walking, benefits can be as much as three to four hundred percent (of already extremely low values) on top of substantial increases in practicality and the convenience of getting to places in much shorter times.

In a very dramatic hypothetical, if all six billion people on this planet -- and the anticipated nine billion people by midcentury -- were to use bicycles instead of walking, fundamental human mobility energy usage and emissions would be reduced by a factor of three to four times!

Ultimately, if ideal vehicles replace standard vehicles there may be justification to consider them negative VMT vehicles; doubly so if they can serve as modular components of transit systems to greatly improve systemic efficiencies, practicality, and costs.

http://www.aerorider.com/en/aerorider.html

With research into large-scale removal of carbon from the atmosphere currently considered inevitable, it will be much more, if not impossibly difficult, if emissions are not drastically reduced.

"At present we would need some 20 million tonne-a-day units to absorb emissions from the transportation sector alone."   Clearing the Air, New Scientist 10 January 2009

Which means that for the transportation sector there is significant urgency to develop and broadly implement minimal energy and emission technologies modeled after idealized vehicles.This may be much more practical at least in the short term than broad implementation of large, heavy, personal electric vehicles and major conventional transit infrastructure improvements, which may not really provide suitable remediation, and dramatically reducing sprawl by conversion to optimally-scaled shoe-leather communities where most trips can be achieved by walking.

 

It is important to understand legacy systems. They are old, often deeply entrenched systems that do not work well but cost a lot to replace. More importantly though, they cost a lot to maintain and they cost a lot to upgrade and they do not do the job well. In the long run legacy systems cost a lot more to run than it costs to replace them.

The current state of transit is legacy technology. The concept for moving a lot of people quickly is to pack a large number of people into very large heavy vehicles and move them fast. Large vehicles require very cumbersome, inflexible, and expensive infrastructures for support.  In many instances, the time taken to get to and or wait for buses and trains is as long or longer than going to the final destination by bicycle and even walking; especially, during off-peak hours and at low-use locations.  Perhaps a much more suitable name for conventional mass transit would be big vehicle rapid transit (BVRT) or expensive big vehicle rapid transit (EBVRT) and for bicycle travel and public bicycle systems would be bicycle rapid transit or BRT.

Vélib

Larger Image 

From "Bike-Share Opportunities in New York City, 2009"  (page 25)

Since it is only people that are being moved, using modular vehicles the size and weight of human beings, and optimally much smaller, is a much better, more agile and cost-effective way to move them. Bicycles would be the first step in achieving such systems, by converting 40% of New York City travel to cycling, as in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Borrowing from successes of Parisian Vélib and German public bike systems, scaled up to significantly service New York’s 8.5 million daily commuter population, will be the most expedient cost-effective first step implementing modern and immediately valuable transit improvements.

Shared Space

21st Century Street Design Competition (Transportation Alternatives)

While advanced industrial design and development of vehicles and transit systems will achieve much during the next steps it is easy to undervalue bicycle technology as a pivotal, very elegant solution. Bicycles are the premiere, very successful, ideal vehicles in the developing world.  Over 600 million bicycles served as serious transportation in China at the start of its industrial revolution. Many hundreds of millions continue to this day providing very important services not only in Asia but in Africa to include the delivery of critical medical supplies to impoverished areas for the United Nations Global Fund. The inherent advantages of bicycles are that they only require human energy; they allow a person to travel four times faster than walking and that being low cost, very small, and light, have the extremely important transportation attributes of being readily distributed to provide immediate no-wait transportation on-demand; precisely the critical services required by fast-paced modern societies. Just as cars have been described as The Machine that Changed the World, NYC travel converted to 40% cycling would start a similar paradigm shift but with a much broader and very positive sustainable outcome.

And, what might happen?

Forty-percent cycling in New York City will be transformational. Mortality for car accidents with pedestrians and cyclists will become statistically insignificant and the amount of noise, dirt, and danger produced by cars will plummet. Large areas of public space will be reclaimed for people. Manhattan Island could easily become an Italian Venice-like fairly-land green renaissance tourist destination of intimate diverse locales: some secluded, many packed with people, busy, fast and rich, yet easily accessible. Glimpses of this are appearing now at places like Union Square and during the Summer Streets events. The burgeoning boroughs in variegated patchworks of ethnicities and cultures will have their own delights and grow rich providing housing of the requisite human capital, talent, for huge tourist, arts, news and media, sports, finance, high-skill manufacturing, design and innovation, medical, and academic industries. An incredible urban environment with lots of water fronts, waterways, plazas, broad peopled avenues, and easy, convenient distributed and on-demand transportation for everyone. And, a transit system in a state of constant reinvention to move the daily millions; modular to the extreme, with components limited in diminution by the varieties of human sizes and needs for comfort and convenience: to be agile, above ground, adaptive, fun and fast; in the sun, immersed in weather, and under the stars.­

 

From "Blueprint for the Upper West Side"
A roadmap for truly livable streets.

 

Important technological trajectory and psychology 

With the projections by mid-century of commercial implementation of molecular-strength materials about 100 times stronger per weight than steel, overpowered and oversized vehicles would be like pushing around air balloon with large engines.  There are considerable asymmetries in perceptions of "serious" transport in terms of size, power, expense, complexity, etc. even in the recent, very important, and highly laudable New York City report on public bicycle systems: "Bike-Share Opportunities in New York City, 2009", since scale and technology development (none) recommendations fall significantly below what a "serious" cost-benefit analysis could potentially indicate good economic sense.  With molecular-strength carbon nanotubes and graphene projected to be practical around mid century, Iron Man's wearable vehicle might have the same retro appearance as those goofy rockets in the original black-and-white Flash Gordon films and, conventional upright bicycles may exist as a mere retro niche.

Some Technology

Full-size military grade folding bikes solve street space, personal space, and theft problems to greatly facilite the broadest transport and transit options.

SwissBike Advanced Mobility Montague Military Bicycles  Folding

 

Folding recumbent tricycles with auxiliary electric powering provide wheel-chair like accessibility in high-performance comfortable and practical vehicles.

   

TriceQ (folded)

 

Truly sustainable transportation technology exists here and now and only requires the focus to make it happen. 

 Pac-Car II World's Most Fuel-Efficient Car

28 June 2005:  For a new world record, PAC-Car II reached 5,385 km with hydrogen equivalent to 1 liter of gasoline and equal to 12,669 miles per gallon!  Guinness World Records™ has certified PAC-Car II, from ETH Zurich, as the world's most fuel-efficient vehicle.

 

Bamboo bicycle frames

Very high quality sustainable bamboo frames as a labor-intensive cash crop can potentially provide for a huge number of affordable bicycles, industry, and income for the developing world at the same time greatly reducing bicycle costs suitable for broad implementation in the developed world .  Currently, very expensive at over $2,000, reducing costs for producing these frames by about one hundred times could provide for a formidable growth industry and huge global benefit; in particular, as suppliers to public bicycle systems.

http://www.calfeedesign.com/bamboo.htm

 

GluBam bamboo construction suitable for sustainable monorails and infrastructure

The bridge Yan Xiao built in Leiyang with GluBam was the town’s first. Each beam that spans the brick columns was created using Xiao’s novel process of transforming irregular bamboo into a practical building material. First he tore strips of bamboo from the stalk and arranged them in such a way as to provide the most strength. He then coated the strips with glue and compressed them in a self-built hydraulic press into beams, 33 feet long and up to three feet wide, each capable of supporting eight tons. Xiao says that the beams cost just 20 percent as much as imported lumber. Better still, rural China has a constantly replenishing supply of bamboo.

http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/product/glubam-construction

 

Clothing

Improvements in clothing will continue with light-weighting, streamlining, expanded comfort ranges, durability and body armor protection.  What about the cold?  "There is not such thing as bad weather," says former Formula One Engineer Kieron Bradley.  "Just bad clothing." 

A legendary sports-car builder engineers a featherweight, concept ice vehicle (CIV) to lead a 3,000-mile expedition across Antarctica.  One key feature is the open canopy which directs air over the cockpit, making it impossible for ice to build up on the windshield.  -- Popular Science February 2009 page 52    Detailed Picture

 

Schoeller’s Coldblack technology

Most black clothing absorbs 90 percent of the sun’s heat, but black fabrics that have been treated with Schoeller’s Coldblack technology during the dying process actually reflect 80 percent of heat rays (nearly as much as white fabrics) while also offering UPF 30+ protection against harmful ultraviolet rays. The company keeps the technology a closely guarded secret, but the results speak for themselves: Temperature tests at independent labs found that a Coldblack-treated shirt held under infrared lamps stayed 10°F cooler on the interior and 22° cooler on the surface than a regular shirt. Expect to see Coldblack popping up soon in apparel like black Mammut Champ and Westcomb Talus mountaineering pants. schoeller-textiles.com

 

Intelligent Heat

To make a fabric-thin heater that runs for up to six hours—perfect for the insides of gloves, jackets or boots—Energy Integration Technologies did away with thermostats that suck power and take up space. Its system, Aevex, uses a flexible polymer film that automatically regulates its own temperature. As the wearer’s body gets cold, the film gets denser, which increases its electrical conductivity. This change pulls power from a battery and warms the fabric up. When the wearer’s temperature increases, the heat reduces the film’s conductivity and shuts off current flow. Aevex debuted in Outdoor Research Primovolta gloves [top; $250] and Mountain Hardwear Red Savina gloves [bottom; $300], with more gear to follow. energyintegrationtech.com

  

Air bag safety

Encapsulating on-demand crumple zones could be the logical extension of standard automobile air bag technology to greatly improve the crash protection of ideal vehicles.

Curtains that can handle a hurricane might be suitable as on-demand enclosures

JHRG Storm-A-Rest
Now bracing for category-4 mayhem means simply pulling down your shades. Storm-A-Rest manufacturer JHRG managed to turn a few pounds of .025-inch-thick fabric into stronger storm protection for windows than plywood. Faced with two-by-fours shot at 34 mph from an air cannon (one of the tests for category-4 certification in Florida), Storm-A-Rest panels survived undamaged; the boards punched right through plywood. Best of all, the shades let in about 80 percent of sunlight, so you’re not in the dark when the power goes out.

The fabric’s brute strength comes from Honeywell Spectra fiber—the same stuff used in some bulletproof vests—adapted to stand up to Florida’s tough building codes. To make a wind- and waterproof coating (typically used on outdoor gear) stick to Spectra’s slippery polyethylene strands, the company spent two and a half years finding the correct mix of time and heat for an even coating. Engineers also had to determine the right weave pattern and density to stop large projectiles. It turned out that a slightly loose weave worked best to dissipate the energy of an impact.

“After [a string of hurricanes in] ’04, everyone got into the storm-protection business,” says Florida contractor Michael Faraone. “We’ve used some
of the other products. This is the only one that really is storm protection.” $20 per sq. ft.; stormarest.com

http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/product/jhrg-storm-rest

 

Medical Advances

In many instances, self-propulsion provides the most convenient, practicle, and resilient way to power ideal vehicles with the resultant physical conditioning being an additional advantage since exercise is important for executive motor control and general well-being.  Sports and other medical advances will contribute to endurance, speed, age and accessibility-related improvements.

Roughly equivalent to the trauma caused by many of the modern weapons of war, the level of brute force horrific trauma visited by transportation vehicles is a treatable and preventable disease with the solution equivalent in simplicity to having physicians and healthcare workers wash their hands.

The equivalent solution is to have transportation vehicles that are the size and weight of human beings and optimally much less and with auxiliary powering the same or much less than the amount of power that human beings can produce.

Of course, full body armor will save a lot of lives in the current situation, but really!?

Symbolically, in any case, it was two transportation vehicles that brought down the twin towers within a few short hours ironically roughly equivalent to the daily mortality figure for road accidents worldwide generally acknowledged to be significantly under-reported and even more devastating in those billion-person segments of the world population where medical care is minimal to non-existent.

Just as the structural violence resulting from great disparities in healthcare -- largely based on socio economic factors -- requires immediate remedy, the same goes for transportation systems largely based on automobiles where the violence is much more physically apparent.
 

 

Elevated rails

Providing automated hands-free operation, collision avoidance, express routes and extended space for travel with minimal environmental impact, elevated rails could easily become the new much better roads.  Highways for cars do not make a lot of sense for urban areas since they take up a large amount of space.  Elevated rails with minimal street level footprints can serve as the new highways for ideal vehicles and provide for greatly increased transit capacity.  A proposed cycle rail idea envisions the logical extension of public bike systems into ideal vehicle systems with highly improved safety, practicality, ease of use, greater speeds and range.

 

In an age of technological metamorphosis mechanics is rapidly changing into electronics

Electronics often "eliminates much of the maintenance required by mechanical systems."

"Later this year, Giant, the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world, will offer a bike designed to use only electronic parts for about $14,000, . . . . If consumers fancy the device, it will likely follow the pattern of other new electronics and drop significantly in price over time." 

-- Cycling Enters the Electronic Age With a New Gear-Shifting System, Ian Austen, New York Times, February 14, 2009

The connection between electronic communications and transportation has had a long history starting when the telegraph replaced the pony express, and integrated with ideal vehicles -- public bicycle systems inclusive -- has the potential to take on a crucial position in the evolution of a truly sustainable manmade world.

 

Magnetic levitation and linear induction motors

Electro-magnetic technology increases reliability and performance by reducing moving parts and rolling friction and facilitating automation to maximize convenience and practicality; specifically suitable for enhancing human-powered rail systems described below.

Magnetic levitation (maglev) using permanent magnet arrays.

Linear Induction (LIM) and Linear Sychnronous (LSM) motors

 

The Shweeb Human-Powered Monorail   

Great Discovery Channel video:  http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/april-2009/daily-planet-april-10-2009/#clip159750

 

"The world’s populations are increasingly migrating to huge cities, and the densities within our cities are steadily climbing as residential towers become the dominant mode of residence. Traffic is slowing to walking pace, there is little parking and there is significant and ever-increasing pollution of the air we breathe.  Of note, the average speed of a motor vehicle in central London in 1908 was 8 mph.  In 2008 it was still 8 mph.

"Any attempt to resuscitate the automobile by devising a new fuel or engine is doomed. Our cities simply can’t cope with rising numbers of cars or parking spaces. In our opinion a fresh approach is required. 

Shweeb Inventor Geoffrey Barnett

 

"Our proposal to get you safely and quickly from one point in the city to another would be to elevate you onto a network of interconnected monorails where you never have to stop at traffic lights. The ideal vehicle for such a system already exists. Fully faired recumbent cycles, because of their low aerodynamic resistance, are breaking all bicycle speed records and currently reaching speeds of 90 kph (56 mph) in sprints. Suspending these comfortable and highly efficient machines from monorail tracks has the added advantage of taking away the rolling resistance of pneumatic tyres. Trains of Shweebs can further reduce the aero drag – ten people travelling at 40 kph will each have a lot less work to do than a single rider at the same speed. A single rider requires only a fraction of the energy to achieve the same speed as a normal cyclist – thanks to the significant reductions in both aero drag and tire friction.  The vehicle is completely weatherproof; you can’t derail or fall out while on the cell phone or blackberry!

"The result is the most efficient vehicle on earth, the most inexpensive infrastructure of any proposed urban transit and one of the highest capacity systems available – delivering 20,000+ people per hour in a 1x1 m2 airspace. All this with zero carbon omissions and no parking worries or cost!

"The Shweeb Research and Development team, headed by Geoffrey Barnett has spent six years designing this system. The Rotorua launch has proven the safety and efficiency of the technology. More and more of our riders are getting excited about the idea of getting up in the morning and Shweebing to work."  -- Shweeb promotional

Public Bicycle Systems

One of the most important modern advances in mobility may prove to be the emergence of public bicycle systems with the potential comparable to the productivity advances in agrarian reform attributed to Norman Borlaug (acknowledged to have saved as many as one billion lives) or even the rapid evolution of electronic comunications.  Since bicycle technology can amplify human mobility by about three to four hundred percent through simple mechanical means a mass transit system based on this low-cost, highly available and sustainable technology has terrific advantage.  The addition of  a small amount of auxiliary electric powering raises these systems to levels of convenience, practicality, and comfort normally expected in developed world societies. 

Since mass transit normally tries to accommodate those people that have trouble using their systems such as the special seats at the front of buses, elevators in subway stations, handicapped parking spaces, attended wheelchairs in Amtrak and airport stations, bike systems should also have these accommodations. 

Recumbent hybrid human-electric tricycles with the necessary safety improvements will provide a huge leap in making universal accessibility possible at the same time creating extremely convenient, practical, comfortable systems. 

There is a huge amount of space for bikes and a lot more for the ones that fold.  It's absurd to worry about the costs of bike parking like it would be absurd to think about charging people to walk around in the subway system.

Taken to the logical extreme, designing for automated assembly and disassembly in systems using millions of bikes servicing many more millions of people would not take much for these rather simple machines; here and now for compactification and the ultimate in minimal storage.  Mid century capabilities would likely include design, build, and implement on demand using technologies currently existent but very expensive that require a modern highly skilled workforce.

More advanced systems will start to include mechanical (rail and guide way systems), electro-mechanical (to include use of radio frequency IDs), and increasingly intelligent automation with manual overrides.  It's amazing how many people easily become competent in bicycles; but, not all.  Recumbent hybrid human-electric tricycles are pretty much accessible to everyone and most effectively address the transportation needs of those with disabilities; especially, for those with visual impairment and must rely on a certain practical level of interactive automation within the system either mechanically through the use of guideways and or electromechanically through the use of radio frequency IDs and other rapidly emerging intelligent innovations.

Rail systems similar to Shweeb can provide additional mechanical and electrical enhancements further extending speed, range, practicality, and comfort suitable not only for urban environments but for intercity travel safely well above current speed limits at around 80 miles per hour.  They can be enhanced with low-cost permanent magnetic levitation (maglev) such as Inductrak employing Halbach arrays.  MagneMotion is an existing commercial system that uses attractive permanent magnetic arrays and linear synchronous motors for propulsion.  Traveling in evacuated tubes to mitigate the major losses from air friction, advanced systems would be suitable for even longer distances at higher speeds greater than 300 miles per hour where the amount of energy expended would be more closely applied to overcoming inertial forces such as going uphill, around turns, and acceleration.

Key transportation professionals should be confronted to explain exactly why they do not think that human powered and hybrid human-electric powered transportation is serious transportation deserving of resources typical of the other forms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_sharing_system 

 

Proposed New York City program size and extent

Bike-share programs that are financially self-sufficient tend to be larger programs that can take advantage of volume-based funding mechanisms such as advertising or membership fees, and focused around densely populated or highly trafficked area where bicycles and bike-stations can be used by the maximum number of people. In many cases, this combination on of attributes also creates programs which see significant transportation and health benefits. In contrast, small programs, and programs that are placed in low density/less trafficked areas, do not typically produce the revenues required to be financially self-sustaining. These programs provide few, if any, transportation on or health benefits. Purely recreational programs, similar to bike rentals currently offered by private companies such as Bike-And-Roll, likewise fail to provide needed positive transportation on or health impacts.

New York City’s size—304 square miles spread over four distinct land masses—and range of population densities—85,000 people/square mile in Manhattan vs. 9,000 people/square mile in Staten Island—means that the city will have to think strategically about program expansion. A high bike-station density (28-30 stations/square mile) is necessary for bike-share programs because it allows users to find and return bicycles easily. In lower density areas this bike-station density may be financially infeasible. Staten Island, for example, is excluded from the citywide bike-share program recommended in this report because of its small potential user base. In some lower density areas, it may be more cost effective to encourage bicycling by increasing the quantity and quality of personal bicycle parking facilities rather than by introducing a bike-share program.

From "Bike-Share Opportunities in New York City, 2009" 

 

Common Wealth
Economics for a Crowded Planet

Jeffrey D. Sachs

"The fundamental reason for believing that prosperity can spread to all corners of the world is that the very science and technology that underpin prosperity in the rich world are potentially available to the rest of the world as well. If the rich countries are rich because they have adopted these improved technologies – power generation, medicine, transport, construction, and much more – the same improved technologies can also be adopted in today’s impoverished countries. As we noted earlier, technology has the wonderful property of being nonrival; each person, business, or country can adopt the technology without limiting the ability of others to adopt the technology as well. Unlike a given number of barrels of oil, which are available either for you or for me, but not both, the fruits of scientific advancement such as the human genome or the Internet are available for any and all, without the need to ration knowledge. Moreover, for many advanced technologies—the internet, computer operating systems, vaccinations, insecticide-treated bed nets, mobile phone – the benefits are greater the more that others are using the technology. Such technologies are often called network technologies, and the benefits of mass uses are called network externalities. Fittingly, we live in a networked age, where there advent of such technologies has soared

-- Chapter 9; The Strategy of Economic Development (pages 205-206)

 

Bundled Transport and Communications Business Model

Drawing on human power, networks of public bicycle systems may be poised to go viral.  Long blinded by an irrational exhuberance toward super-sized personal transport and mass transit it is time for a reprieve from an age of hyper-industrialization to acknowledge a more convivial integration of our natural gifts.

Ideal vehicles have the potential to be so inexpensive that it may be advantageous to consider bundling public bicycle-type systems with cell phone communications to include global positioning and automated electronic billing services.  The options may exist for users to use their own vehicles in the system, just like they could use their own phone.  Even so, the one-time ideal vehicle costs may be comparable to one-time hardware and setup communications costs and ongoing costs are often low-to-nothing, especially for users providing their own human power over short distances; the cost structure for transportation services including substantial use of modern information and communications technologies might not be much different than for wireless communications.  Users of such systems could be expensed for energy usage and estimated wear-and-tear based on distances traveled. Some of the same computer revolution players who stand to capitalize on the oncoming green solar revolution like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Intel could also be major players in establishing a new international model for hyper-green transport and mass transit where communications and information technology provide considerable advantage.  Providers such as Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile would have much to gain from such a positively disruptive green transportation revolution.  Landline services typical of the new Verizon Hub might be suitable for more advanced easy-to-build hybrid human-electric agile rail services with electric power and high-speed optical fiber connectivity. 

Capitalizing on information and communication technologies and sorting technology such as that implemented in United Parcel Service's World Port, integration of freight with people delivery would further enhance transport efficiencies and revenue streams where letters and packages could automatically "hitch" rides on people carriers en route to destinations.  Microsoft founder Bill Gates used to describe the internet as local area networks greatly expanded.  Close integration of transportation with information and communcations technologies could take on a similar sense of expansivity.

An I.B.M. system that monitors and analyzes traffic patterns is tested in Hawthorne, N.Y. Large companies can have an edge in solving complex problems.

Who Says That Innovation Belongs To The Small, Steve Lohr, NY Times, May 23, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/business/24unboxed.html

“There are just a few companies in a position to do computing and process data in a way never done before,” says Richard F. Rashid of Microsoft.

Who Says That Innovation Belongs To The Small, Steve Lohr, NY Times, May 23, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/business/24unboxed.html

 

Wi-Fi To Go, No Cafe Needed, NY Times May 6, 2009  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/technology/personaltech/07pogue.html

 

Moving millions of people within a few short hours in New York City, selective automation will play a pivotal role.  It cost about one-half billion dollars for Volkswagen to build the new Beetle.  Based on a synthesis of highly accessible here-and-now technology, a "back-of-the-envelope" heuristic for industrial design and development of a New York City ideal vehicle transit "SystemOne" might easily come in at the same price -- for an entire system! -- with the payback being virtually immediate upon broad implementation since MTA deficit-incurring legacy-transit expenses continue at over nine billion dollars per year.  The process is already in progress as the city's department of transportation continues to make our urban environment safer for cyclists and pedestrians though not at the scale required for a timely transformation.  With a public bike system request for proposals being projected for June 2009 approximate and commitment at year-end, things should speed up dramatically with the hope that virtually all suppliers will be local (or, strongly encouraged to become local) to initially produce in excess of one hundred thousand bicycles and supporting infrastructure.  One promising innovation might include attended bike parking using modular mobile concessionary bike stations currently being promoted and designed by Hubstation owner George Bliss that would greatly reduce vandalism and theft and provide for an accelerated cost-effective agile implementation coincident with lots of green jobs and local community commitment; potentially drawing some of the human capital from Mayor Michael Bloomberg's vocational education initiative, the city's small business initiatives, and selected space from Janette Sadik-Khan's DoT Plaza Program to truly showcase what can be done.  Mobile attended bike parking with concessionary facilities in large public bicycle programs have the potential to employ a lot of people while providing for favorable income streams into the system.

Targeting a forty-percent cycling New York with the requisite millions of vehicles designed and manufactured each year along with incremental yet dramatic systemic improvements all achieved locally would produce a formidable labor force and creative incubator for global green transportation solutions in a rapidly accelerating trillion dollar market central to the Northeast United States strategically significant as the world's third largest economy . . . and perhaps, "The New Detroit".

"Bike Among The Ruins", Tony Barlow NYT July 4, 2009  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05barlow.html 

Important: 

Jeff Sachs on sustainable development video, March 2, 2009  http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/2323#global_coop

 

The General Motors Puma

 

GM Segway P.U.M.A prototype http://www.segway.com/puma/media-center.php

Pods Could Unseat Cars for Urban Transport, Washington Post, April 10, 2009 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041001752.html

Without sweating the details this comes off as a great first step perhaps similar to IBM developing the first personal computer. These vehicles seem to meet very important criteria for urban transport in that they seem practical, convenient, and comfortable; are small, lightweight, produce no local emissions, and are relatively efficient moving people. They should also be easy to network – just like personal computers – to start development of the first modern mass transit system. And, with the current economic crisis it should relatively easy to obtain the resources for research and development towards such a goal. Since a typical subway car weighs about 35 tons, costs about $1.2 million, and carries a maximum of 188 people, the $6,000 falls below per person costs for subway cars and infrastructure costs should be a lot less because of the greatly reduced vehicle weight and size leading to an extremely agile modular system.

Immediate and trivial adaptations to carry bicycles could make them suitable as an integral parts of large public bike systems wherein 100,000 of the vehicles potentially could easily be a part of an infrastructure supporting several million cyclists as truly positive disruptive technology scale-appropriate to current federal financial and sustainable subsidies at $600 million.  People using these systems may be able to use their own personal vehicles -- just like on automotive highways -- as well as those supplied by the system the way bicycles are provided in the Parisian Vélib.

There are any number of reasons General Motors has not sought to actively promote these vehicles as they cannibalize its high-margin automotive market and greatly reduces the resources necessary for a company (or individual) to enter into the personal transportation market (as for the Uno motor cycle developed by a high school student now studying at MIT) trending towards technology readily suitable for commodification and elimination of local monopolies.

Emergence of India's Tata Nano automobile at $2,500 and others from Chinese manufactures in addition to extreme financial and environmental pressures indicates that the time is right for reinventing personal transport and transit business and technology models wherein hopefully, high value mobility expertise and services will prevail.

Regarding transit options it seems that the GM-Segway PUMA is a very good investment at about $600 million for 100,000 vehicles and broad implementation of similar hybrid human-electric vehicles would be even better with optimization likely trending toward single-person recumbent streamlined on-demand foldable tricycle designs.  Since the Paris Velib system averages about 10 to 12 rides per bike daily, a PUMA-based transit system based on 100,000 vehicles would provide over 1 million rides daily.  It might not be too much of a stretch to imagine one million (or less) of the GM-Segway PUMA-like vehicles providing mass transit for New York City at an initial one-time cost of about half the annual MTA $9 billion cash outlay.  And, if they were made locally it would likely cost a lot less and be a lot better with significant community involvement. The Segway balancing system may not be required for vehicles used in systems where they may be controlled mechanically by guideways and rails and linked with other vehicles further dramatically reducing per vehicle costs; and, may simply be "relaxed" off-system to accommodate human powering in a less upright position. 

"Pods Could Unseat Cars for Urban Transport", Washington Post, April l10, 2998: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041001752.html

 

Hybrid Human-Electric Agile Monorail

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Velo-City 

The  Buckminster Fuller Challenge

http://challenge.bfi.org/application_summary/450#

http://www.velo-city.ca/

 

Chris Hardwicke Principal

Around the world there is a revival of cycling as a mode of urban transportation. Velo-city is an infrastructure solution for urban mobility that offers an alternative model to the unsustainable private automobile system. Velo-city is a highway for bicycles, a network of elevated bikeways that connect distant parts of our cities. It is a system of glass enclosed bikeway tubes that shelter cyclists while making it easier to ride. Velo-city is a breakthrough in transportation infrastructure because it is the only rapid transit system that uses human power as its primary fuel. Its innovation is using the bicycle (the most inexpensive and efficient vehicle we have) and the aerodynamic system that makes cycling easier. Each direction of travel in Velo-city has a separate bikeway tube with three lanes of traffic for slow, medium and fast travel. The separation of direction reduces wind resistance and creates a natural tailwind for cyclists, increasing the efficiency of cycling by about 90 percent and allowing for speeds of up to 50 kilometres per hour. In fact, the more people that use the system, the more efficient it becomes. Not only does Velo-city make it easier to cycle long-distances it provides shelter. One of the challenges of cycling is convincing people to brave inclement weather. In our modern cities we drive to work and drive to workout. Velo-city is like a long gymnasium between destinations; it encourages people to workout on the way to work. This saves time, energy and money. Because Velo-city is elevated, it does not require any additional real estate as it can be located in existing highways, power and railway corridors. Velo-city, is a unique form of rapid transit because it is active rather than passive. Velo-city promotes exercise as an urban lifestyle and increases our social sphere. All other modern modes of transit are passive - they take users for a ride. Users of Velo-city understand the value of distance and its relationship to the environment because they put their own energy into their mobility. The value of this mobility is expressed in individual freedom of choice and movement. Velo-city offers an alternative: a new model of infrastructure that acts in support of other modes of transit. The bikeways are connected to the subway, railway, highway and parking lots, thereby offering more commuting choices. The tenacious bicycle has been around for over 100 years and last year bicycles outsold automobiles in worldwide. Velo-city simply gives bicycles the same level of dedicated infrastructure that other modes of transportation enjoy -- and doing so might just change the world. 

   

 

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(more to come)

  

ALSO ON THE LIVABLE STREETS NETWORK

·          Vehicle-Miles Traveled

·          Safety in Numbers

REFERENCES

Each source is referred to by the same number every time it is cited. Please keep citation style consistent.

[1] Legacy Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_systems)

[2] Public Bike Systems (http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm126.htm)

[3] Bicycling Science 3^rd Edition, David Gordon Wilson

[4] Bicycle Safety in Numbers, Scientific American, 60-Second Science Podcast; September 10, 2008 For a city to improve bicycle safety, the prescription actually is to put even more riders on the streets.

[5] The Machine that Changed the World, described as "The Story of Lean Production", ironically ignores the benefits of traveling light, lean low-carbon transportation, and the extremely lean infrastructures required by this technology.

[6] Clearing the Air, New Scientist 10 January 2009, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126901.200-can-technology-clear-the-air.html 

Pictures are cited in the order they appear above. Please keep citation style consistent.

[1] Shweeb Discovery Channel video:  http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/april-2009/daily-planet-april-10-2009/#clip159750

[2]

FURTHER READING

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_sharing_system
• One Tunnel, Two Views of the Future; Jim Dwyer, New York Times 09/23/2008

• Green Collar Jobs -- The Future of the Global Workplace; Jerome Ringo, Scientific American Science and Society, December 2008

• Pac-Car II World's Most Efficient Car  http://www.paccar.ethz.ch/news/index at 12,669 mpg (equivalent)

• The Shweeb Human-Powered Monorail http://www.shweeb.com/Shweeb/technology_IDL=1_IDT=2190_ID=13165_.html

• TriceQ (quick) folding tricycles http://ice.hpv.co.uk/trikes/q.htm

• SwissBike Advanced Mobility Montague Military Bicycles  Folding

• Innovation Should Mean More Jobs, Not Less;  New York Times 04 Jan 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04unboxed.html

• "Tools for Conviviality", Ivan Illich; Harper and Row, Publishers, 1973

• Bike Rail:  Car-Free New York Presentation 
• The Bike-Sharing Blog http://bike-sharing.blogspot.com/
• Can the Cellphone Industry Keep Growing?  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/technology/companies/04cell.html
• Popular Science Concepts and Prototypes:  Ice Scout http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-02/concepts-and-prototypes-ice-scout
• Verizon Hub  http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/vzhub/overview.jsp
• Cycling Enters the Electronic Age With a New Gear-Shifting System, Ian Austen, New York Times, February 14, 2009
• How the Crash Will Reshape America, Richard Florida,  Atlantic, March 2009;  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography
• Power From The People, Bruce Grierson, Popular Science, March 2009 (pages 60-67, 81-82)
  http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/podcast-power-people
  
  Bruce Grierson podcast
  http://cdn1.libsyn.com/popsci/CPS-Podcast-23.mp3?nvb=20090309204407&nva=20090310205407&t=005af15c7f864f3b14f6c
• The Cell Phone Navigating Our Lives , John Markoff, New York Times, February 16, 2009
• IBM Smart Traffic website  http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/smartplanet/topics/traffic/20081201/index.shtml
• Microsoft Mapping Course to a Jetson-Style Future, Ashlee Vance, New York Times, March 2, 2009  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/technology/business-computing/02compute.html?ref=business
• Very high-quality bamboo bicycle frames http://www.calfeedesign.com/bamboo.htm
• Jeff Sachs on sustainable development, March 2, 2009,   http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/2323#global_coop 
• GM Segway Project P.U.M.A. http://www.segway.com/puma/media-center.php
• Bike-Share Opportunities in New York City, 2009  http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/transportation/td_bike_share.shtml 
• Pods Could Unseat Cars for Urban Transport, Washington Post, April l10, 2998; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041001752.html
• Wi-Fi to Go, No Cafe Need, NY Times May 6, 2009  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/technology/personaltech/07pogue.html
• New York City Street Design Manual  http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/streetdesignmanual.shtml
• Natural Capitalism, By Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins http://www.rmi.org/store/pdetails42.php
• Who Says That Innovation Belongs To The Small, Steve Lohr, NY Times, May 23, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/business/24unboxed.html
• Velo-City http://challenge.bfi.org/application_summary/450#
• Our Crumbling Foundation, Bob Herbert, New York Times, May 25, 2009  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26herbert.html
• Bicycles touted as ‘first modern post-fossil vehicle’ http://www.euractiv.com/en/transport/bicycles-touted-modern-post-fossil-vehicle/article-182342
• Detroit’s Woes Wound an Army of Suppliers, Louise Uchitelle, NYT June 2, 2009  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/business/03suppliers.html
• Bike Among The Ruins, Tony Barlow, NYT July 4, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05barlow.html
• The Mannahatta Project  http://themannahattaproject.org/