Personal freedom: The world hasn’t embraced secular democracy, but it has embraced traffic.
Personal freedom: The world may not have embraced secular democracy, but it has embraced traffic. The radical success of the car has brought about its failure. As a result, personal mobility projects are underway worldwide to deliver maximum freedom with minimal impact.
RELIEVE CONGESTION: According to Dean Kamen, 43% of our fuel is used while we’re sitting still. With the electrically-powered Segway HT (see below), his dream is to reconfigure dense urban environments and accommodate a cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternative to the automobile. Photo Courtesy Sara Moss.
• Road traffic injuries are predicted to become the third largest contributor to the global burden of disease by 2020
• Road traffic deaths are predicted to increase by 83% in low-income and middle-income countries, and to decrease by 27% in high-income countries; these figures amount to a predicted global increase of 67% by 2020
• It is estimated that every year, road traffic crashes cost US$518 billion
• The average annual delay per person in the United States has climbed from 11 hours in 1982 to 36 hours in 1999
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. Most buyers of 4×4s, for example, don’t even drive them off-road. They just like to know that they could. Potential freedom is what they want. With millions of cars now clogging up the urban landscape in both the developed and developing worlds, the global design challenge is to design lighter, smarter and less expensive options.
From the motorized scooter and Sinclair C5 to the Moller Skycar and multimodal, task appropriate transportation options and systems developed by Carboy (Dan Sturges), personal freedom is not about a single technology or project. It’s really about a vector in the scatter plot of ongoing projects whose goal is to produce liberty with greater efficiency and less environmental impact.
New developments in the realms of energy and manufacturing promise to revolutionize short-distance surface mobility. In particular, inventor Dean Kamen’s Segway Human Transporter could very well “shrink�? cities and make cars cumbersome. The challenge to overcome is our cultural attachment to a four-wheeled dream machine and the infrastructure that supports it.
FROM PROTOTYPE TO COMMERCIAL PRODUCT: The Segway HT is more than industrial design. It is a synthesis of innovation in computing, gyroscopic sensing, energy, materials and manufacturing. The result is not only a new product, but also a new product category. Succeed or fail, the idea of the Segway HT is here to stay. Above: the iteration (left to right) of the Segway HT design, from the first working prototype to the commercial product available today. Image Courtesy ©Segway LLC.
“Consider the following: a 125 lb. woman drives a new Toyota Sequoia (SUV) down to the nearby commercial center to drop off the videos and pick-up a coffee. The Toyota SUV weights 44 times her weight. So imagine the way royalty were carried on a throne in the ancient times by people. Imagine her being carried by 44 of herself on a platform. The 44 of her are carrying her to take the videos back and to pick-up the coffee. A Segway HT is 60% of her weight. I think this helps to visualize the absurdity of it all.” - Dan Sturges, New Mobility Designer
September 6th, 2008 04:34
electric wheelchair
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