Last night my father and I were walking to dinner and he commented to me that he thinks my generation will be a lot healthier than his–at least on average–given how much more my generation walks. I responded by reaffirming to him how little I drive these days and how much I enjoy that.
Then today, I was watching this short clip of the The High Road with celebrity chef Mario Batali, where he interviews venture capitalist Fred Wilson. During their tour around New York City, Mario asks Fred what he thinks the future of transportation will be. Fred responds by saying that nobody will drive anymore. He then went on to say that the technology for driverless cars is already ready, but that we as a society just aren’t ready for it, yet.
Finally, on my way home from wakeboarding today, I stumbled upon this Guardian Cities article talking about Helsinki’s ambitious plan to make owning a car pointless. By 2025, the goal is have a “point-to-point mobility on-demand system” that will integrate all forms of mobility into one booking and payment platform. Think everything from public transit to carpools to taxis.
As I read on, I then discovered that Helsinki is already offering on-demand public minibuses that allow people to specify their own routes on their smartphone. The system then aggregates all of the requests and establishes the most efficient route based on the immediate demand. Coincidentally enough, it’s quite similar to a use case I wrote about for driverless cars.
All of this got me thinking that one day we’ll probably look back at that time when people used to drive their own vehicles around as some antiquated and hilarious moment from the past.
Image: Observatoire
ATC was featured in The Guardian Cities today as the city blog of the week. It’s a Q&A about Toronto and the idea is for it to be an “urbanist’s guide” to the city. They asked me to be playful and humorous in my responses, and so I tried to do just that.
But my underlying message was that–despite being an awesome city–Toronto needs to get its act together with respect to mobility and transportation. I also recorded a video talking about this problem, which I believe will be released in the next week or so.
A big thanks to The Guardian Cities for asking me to participate and to Athlyn Cathcart-Keays for continuing to be an avid supporter of Architect This City.
As of this week, Architect This City is now being syndicated on MobilityLab. Here’s the first post. MobilityLab is a US-based think tank focused on “transportation demand management”, which is just a fancy way of saying that their focus is on optimizing for the movement of people, instead of cars.
Not every post from ATC will get syndicated on MobilityLab, but hopefully many of the ones focused on mobility will be. But really this post this just to tell you that if you’re interested in transportation, mobility and sustainability, you should check out MobilityLab.
To get you started, here are their top 10 stories from 2013.