Solving mobility problems in future cities

[Thomas_P]

Hey,

I am currently working on a research project and we are trying to solve future urban transport problems; i.e. more people living in cities will cause enormous traffic congestion.

We aim at finding new ways of solving transport or even invent new futuristic vehicles. If you think of cities in 2050, there will be an incredible amount of information sharing which can be used for a semantic system to predict traffic behaviour and flows so as to avoid traffic congestion. This could be used for e.g. robotic cars.

Furthermore, cars as they are known at the moment probably will not exist anymore but other vehicles will be used to enable flexible mobility in cities. In this context, many inhabitants have the problem of the "last mile": getting off the public transport station and having to walk for another 15 minutes until they finally reach their home. Especially for older people this walking distance needs to be bridged with innovative solutions in the future.

Since we all have our issues with the current transport system: have you already had any ideas on future transport or even created solutions (prototypes of future vehicles etc.)? I would be happy to hear some interesting stuff!

Edited November 11, 2011 by Thomas_P

[michel123456]

You will find an old new here.

 

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Cities may change.

Most probably mobility will decrease because working at home will increase. If all goes well.

What will not decrease is the amount of goods to transport. I remember studies about subways for supplies (not for people). I'll have to search a bit if you're interested.

 

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In my country, we are seriously thinking about introducing the ecological vehicule of tomorrow: the donkey.

Edited November 11, 2011 by michel123456

[ewmon]

[iMO]

 

Don't overly-restrict (or prematurely focus) the problem/situation too early in the project so, question the assumption...

solve future urban transport problems; i.e. more people living in cities will cause enormous traffic congestion

...because how many people truly want to live in over-priced shoe boxes crammed among millions of aggravated strangers doing the same thing? Hopefully, with future progress comes more civility and sophistication. Explore alternatives to urban migration. This reminds me of PG&E which finds it more profitable to offer rebates to customers for insulating their homes that to build more/bigger power generation plants.

 

In two extremes on the spectrum of urban traffic management, you have:

• Centrally-managed traffic, as in urban-wide synchronized traffic signals
  
• Individually-managed traffic, as in the shared space concept
  

In two extremes on the spectrum of types of vehicles, you have:

• Large multi-person units for people to access according to its location and schedule (eg, current public transportation)
  
• Individual pods and/or family-sized units travelling individually and/or clustered together (eg, George Jetson)
  

With the need to house and feed an increasing future population, the value of land surface area will increase to the point that motorized vehicular pathways must either go underground or overhead (excluding human-powered traffic, such as pedestrian and bicycle traffic). Because most people would not appreciate peeping-toms traveling past their homes and businesses (or have objects traveling overhead), it seems that underground pathways would prevail — not deep underground, but (for safety reasons) roughly one-story below the surface (perhaps just below human-powered pathways). Exceptions might include traveling over rivers, lakes and other natural obstacles and traveling at/above the surface along scenic routes or in rural areas.

 

[/iMO]

[Xittenn]

I like the ideas presented by Tokyo's Sky City project as seen in Discoveries Extreme Engineering S01E01. Mega cities with plateaus connected by an integrated transportation network comprising of lifts and Maglev systems. I would assume inter-connectivity of such structures would be achieved through the use of high speed rail systems as well.

[Thomas_P]

@michel: that is in fact a good argument. of course we also think about transportation of goods, but the question is whether subway systems will be the future as they are pretty expensive. Furthermore, goods take less space and don't ask for flexibility (like people). So they might either be shifted to the current subway systems or remain overground.

 

@xittenn: Sky city indeed is a very interesting project. That would be the opposite approach: decreasing the need for mobility by making buildings higher. The major problem is the weight of such high buildings and of course the danger that an emergency in just one building might endanger the lives of several thousands or even hundred thousands of people. Furthermore, money also plays an important role. We are really looking for feasible solutions but e.g. sky city would cost several billions. Could be an option for very rich countries, but with millions of inhabitants in future megacities there will also be a lot of poor people. They won't be able to afford such housing.

 

@ewmon: you are right with questioning the assumptions and of course, different developments have an effect on the actual solution. With mobility becoming a major problem (a lot of time is spent in traffic) and job opportunities more and more to be found in cities, urbanization is quite a good assumption in the first place. With more and more people moving to cities and even slums becoming overpriced, many people might move back to rural areas. Tackling urbanization does not seem to be of any "stakeholder"'s interest: people themselves want to move to cities where there is a better health service, more job opportunities etc.; governments would need to invest a lot more in public transport if people need to travel longer distances. And harvesting might be done only by machines.

 

Probably future transport might be a mixture of what you mentioned: Multi-person units for the majority of the distance and single-person units for the so called "last mile". Flexibility seems to be one of the major problem areas as flexible public transport is very expensive (i.e. lower frequency etc.). It might be vital to find a good solution for this last mile as this is the major reason why people take the car. As parking spaces are limited, eliminating ownership of vehicles and providing a high-tech on-demand vehicle system could be a feasible option. And I agree that flying vehicles will probably not be the solution within the next 30 - 40 years. However, the higher the buildings (as mentioned above) the more attractive such solutions.

[Xittenn]

I don't think that "making buildings higher" is analogous to "decreasing the need for mobility." The idea here is organized integration of city and transportation. This is something that we already do, but in a rather crude way.

 

The current focus is on driver freedom and the human right to mobility. The reality is our freedoms are destroying the planet and we need to weigh this into our future development strategies. Any system founded on allowing maximum freedom and mechanical assistance is going to be costly to our resources. Proper integration of resources into living spaces will be the focus of all future developments and this is slowly being realized by all participants in our present re-evaluation's of systems.

[InigoMontoya]

Meh... I think long before we see cities revolutionized by technology we're going to see a major famine or similar that will make the question somewhat moot.