As they say, ‘so much this’.
Every now and again an engineer will want to make something. To get to grips with a problem by building a solution, putting his or her head down and working. And long may this be the case.
Nevertheless, most of the tough problems that left to us are best tackled by keeping your head up, and talking to other people. The fundamental problem of personal road transportation is a coming together of different parties, and is not best solved by ignoring them.
If it seems odd that anybody would put time and money improving the ability of the box on wheels, while leaving the road surface unchanged. The network, after all, is the true success of the age. Clearly the good old train has already shown us that at the very least, power is a good networked service.
With the population of cities rising, the complexity of traffic, parking, power consumption, commuting, and pollution, we know transport is a serious issue. But the car as midlife toy, hero of a thousand Californian dream commercials may still be weighing down the psyche of engineers who should know better. There is no question the car opened up America in the last century, and it is a fixture in the eternal quest for freedom. But that was then.
Plenty of modern initiatives do point the way forwards. Uber has successfully proved transport is a service, not a product. I’m not quite sure what the Hyperloop is, but it seems to be a response to an actual problem. Even car friendly cities like London understand that a cyclist doesn’t want to buy a bike that can withstand damage — they want safety built into a segregated road system. Integrated payment solutions like Oyster also encourage the network interplay of information.
The Mobike (a Beijing company) is a good example of an attempt to deal with the transport unit and the network at the same time. Unlike the ‘Boris’ bikes of central London, Mobikes don’t have a fixed docking station. Each Mobike is individually tracked, and when parked it becomes a node in the network. They are not the most fabulous bicycles, but without the need for docking, they spread out as the environment needs them. This allows an app to find your nearest Mobike, and to unlock it. (It also means they can end up in strange places.)
As the ‘Boris’ bike system requires some infrastructure investment, it has not spread out to the entirety of London, hence the gap that Mobike are filling in West London (in agreement with the local councils). Both solutions work in their different ways.
It seems reasonable to believe that an updated road surface can mix power line and network. This puts much less focus on the shape of the future vehicle itself, which in turn becomes just a container. Piling intelligence into the car, seems vaguely strange compared with putting it into the road.
