MC Weekly Issue #7, Tuesday, January 24, 2006
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”
Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.
We will enable sustainable mobility.
The twentieth century is not just a century that has automobiles. It’s also a century that doesn’t have horses. This is an insight that we need to get our heads around in some basic way. We need to overcome this blindness that we’ve had about what the process of time does to us.
Bruce Sterling, futurist and science-fiction writer.
In the Massive Change book, we argued that “the car eliminated the problems associated with the horse and buggy and answered the need for personal liberty. But its success brought about a new set of problems. With millions of cars now clogging up the urban landscape in both the developed and developing worlds, the global design challenge is to dream up lighter, smarter, and less expensive options.”
Science-fiction literature is rich in imaginative future transportation technologies. Robert Heinlein alone proposed the Rolling Road (1940), the Slidewalk (1948), the Copter Harness (1954), the Wormhole Gate (1955), and the Bounce Tube Pneumatic Travel (1956). Asimov imagined the faster-than-light hyperdrive (1951) and the Gravitic Repulsion Elevator (1951). And then there was the “Mattel”’s Hoverboard in Back to the Future II (1989).
Today, the task of imagining faster, smarter, cleaner, more effective mobility is no longer exclusive to the realm of science fiction. Fantastic new products, working prototypes and experimental devices are being introduced by entrepreneurs and visionaries around the world.
The Moller Skycar is a vertical take-off and landing aircraft, or a flying car. Though it is still in the testing phase, it passed its first flight tests in 2003, and its inventor Paul Moller is now developing it for actual deployment. In Massive Change, we generally avoided discussion of anything less than a working prototype, in order to concentrate on Reality, not Hypothesis. But we make an exception for the Moller Skycar, since the ambition seems so primordial that we simply have to accomplish it one day: provide the ability for personal, easy-to-use flight mobility. Leonardo would be thrilled.
The Hypercar® Vehicle: The Hypercar® vehicle is being designed by the legendary Rocky Mountain Institute, to “capture the synergies of: ultralight construction; low-drag design; hybrid-electric drive; and, efficient accessories to achieve 3 to 5-fold improvement in fuel economy, equal or better performance, safety, amenity and affordability, compared to today’s vehicles.” The vehicle will likely use a version of the internal combustion engine commonly used in today’s cars, but run by fuel-cells using compressed hydrogen, in order to eliminate emissions altogether. In order to facilitate innovation, the Rocky Mountain Institute put the design concept in the public domain, and made the engineering “open source” with two dozen major auto manufacturers in order to maximize its market potential. The Institute claims that the result has been billions of dollars in private investment “and rapid movement of Hypercar-like concepts toward the marketplace.” Check out: http://www.rmi.org/ And for more general information about hydrogen cars and hybrids, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_car.
Going further still is the notion of a Personalized Rapid Transit system. For example, the Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit project is an experimental people-mover created in that West Virginia college town by the U.S. Department of Transportation, working with Boeing, in 1974. WVU’s two campuses consist of two disconnected parcels located in a valley of the Monongahela River. Since it wasn’t possible to expand the downtown campus in the narrow valley, WVU built on a separate parcel, eventually called the Evansdale Campus, above the valley. The WVU PRT has been in continuous operation since 1975, with about 15,000 riders per day (as of 2003). The system uses about 70 vehicles, with an advertised capacity of 20 people each (eight seated, the rest standing). The system connects the university’s disjointed campus using five stations (Walnut, Beechurst, Engineering, Towers, Medical) and a 4 mile (6 km) track. The vehicles are rubber-tired and powered by electrified rails. Steam heating keeps the elevated guideway free of snow and ice. Though popular with the students, the rubber heating has proven too expensive to roll out to other users. The Morgantown system demonstrates automated control, but authorities no longer consider it a true PRT system, because its vehicles are too heavy and carry too many people. During off-peak hours (primarily evenings and weekends), it does not operate in a point to point fashion for individuals or small groups, running instead like an automated people-mover or elevator from one end of the line to the other. It therefore has reduced capacity utilization compared to true PRT, which seems like an area of development about to explode. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Rapid_Transit.
What else is in the works? How about the driverless car?
