Clean, Green Transportation for our Cities
I've been thinking a lot recently about environmentally-friendly mass
transit systems. My recent trip to Sao Paulo reminded me that traffic
congestion and pollution is a major problem for most of the world's
cities. President Obama's focus on reducing our dependence on fossil
fuels and his plans to invest in green infrastructure are also top of
mind. My interest in green transportation was piqued by a wonderful
presentation I heard last November by Professor William J. Mitchell who
heads MIT Media Labs' Smart Cities' program. His cross-disciplinary
team of graduate students from engineering, architecture, city
planning, and business have been working on projects to improve our
cities. He described the Smart Cities project and demo'd three new
electric vehicles that had been designed by the students and sponsors
of the program: CityCar, RoboScooter, and GreenWheel. These are reallly
innovative vehicles. I think you'll enjoy reading about them in this
week's report.
Don't Think Green Transportation; Think Mobility-on-Demand
Bill Mitchell suggests that the best way to think about reducing
pollution, traffic, noise, and parking issues in our cities, is not to
think of alternative transportation systems, but to think in terms of
enabling mobility. He calls this "mobility-on-demand." It's the freedom
that cars provide us. We can go anywhere we want, anytime we want, at
the spur of the moment, if we have a personal car at our disposal. Mass
transit is more programmed. You have to plan ahead or wait for the next
subway. And when you get to the station nearest your destination, you
may still have to walk a distance or take a cab, particularly if you
have things to carry. Bill Mitchell refers to this is the "last mile"
problem. And that's what his Smart Cities team set out to solve with
their new, compact, foldable, electric vehicles. The idea behind
mobility-on-demand is to combine mass transit with personal mobility,
to make that personal mobility affordable by sharing vehicles with
others when you're not using them.
Car & Bike Sharing Programs
One thing I learned from listening to Professor Mitchell that I had
never thought about before is the difference between one-way and
two-way vehicle sharing programs. Most of the world's car-sharing
programs are currently two-way programs. You pick up a car, like a
Zipcar, at a convenient location, run your errands, perhaps drop off
groceries, kids or pets, and then return the car to the same place you
picked it up.
Most bike-sharing programs, like Paris' popular Vélib, are one-way. You
pick up a bike at any location, ride it to your destination (which may
be a subway station or a meeting), drop it off there. And, when you
need another one, you pick it up at a different location. You can ping
pong around the city, picking up and dropping off bikes. In Paris, your
first 30 minutes are free. So if you have a series of short errands to
run, and you can fit your purchases in your large bike basket or
backpack, you have free use of a bike all day, every day. Next year,
Paris plans to add car-sharing to the menu of options, using electric
cars. There's a lot of debate raging about whether these should be
two-way car-sharing systems or one-way systems, like the bikes. (It's
easier to redistribute bicycles every night than it would be to drive a
bunch of cars around the city to get them back to the places people
might need them). The proposed solution—and the one that the MIT Smart
Cities' team proposes—is to use intelligence in the network and dynamic
pricing to encourage people to drop off their cars at a location that
may be a bit less convenient but will cost them less. (I can also
imagine volunteers driving cars from one side of the city to the other,
in exchange for free car use at other times).
How to Design Customer-Centric Ecosystems
These mobility-on-demand systems are complex ecosystems comprised of
many partners. The local government plays a big role. The mass transit
authority, as well as the rail system, play central roles. The most
viable systems are run at a profit on a commercial basis. The revenues
come from a combination of membership fees and usage fees as well as
advertising revenues (in the case of the Vélib system and several
others). Other stakeholders are keenly interested in contributing to
the success of these mobility-on-demand mass transit + shared vehicle
networks. For example developers of urban housing complexes want to
reduce parking and increase the number of units they can build and
other amenities they can offer. Employers want to make it easy for
their employees to commute to work and to be mobile once they're at
work, without having to drive their own cars and without having to
support a large fleet of company cars. Universities want to reduce the
number of students who bring their personal cars to campus and park
them there all day. So these are very complex systems to design, with
many stakeholders involved. The good news is that it IS possible to
design and continuously improve customer-centric ecosystems. Customers
love to participate in co-designing and in streamlining these kinds of
systems to meet their common needs and to address common issues. In
fact, if thoughtful "lead customers" are engaged in the initial design,
you're likely to have much greater uptake, much faster. The key is to
insure that you are designing around customers' critical success
factors and measuring how well you're doing in meeting their needs.
As we start investing in our next generation of
environmentally-sustainable mobility systems, let's make sure that
we're building solutions that customers will actually use!
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