New Mobility - (Concept brainstorm)
Translate Help Desk
|
| Clik2 - The traveler's friend. | |
Clik2 is a concept project for which we are seeking partners. It builds on a broad base of presence and experience in the field of transport innovation in cities that has a twenty year history of notable international activity and accomplishment - the New Mobility Agenda.
The core idea behind Clik2 is to develop an in-pocket communications, information, reservation and access toolkit capable of serving registered users who need to get somewhere and who want to have access to the best way of making their trip. In a first instance we envisage it as a service for people living in and around cities, but there is no reason why the concept cannot be also put to work in rural and lower density areas.
The core of the concept is to use state of the art mobile phones as the multi-function dynamic interface between travelers and all available mobility means. (It also can be accessed from PCs and other interactive communications devices, but since the mobile phone is always in your pocket this makes it the natural for this central role.)
To ease your way into this, think of it as the next step up of the smart card access systems for public transport that we are seeing taking hold in city after city in Europe and North America. But unlike these present-generation system which work only on (some) public transporters, Clik2 reaches out to a much broader range of mobility providers and options.
Clik2 functions as your in-pocket information, reservation, ticketing and billing system for every mobility mode in the city: starting with rail, metro, light rail and bus of course. But it goes way beyond this, reflecting the fact that a well working 21st century urban mobility systems offers many more options that just private cars and/or traditional public transit.
Thus Clik2 provides current information on and access to small or more specialized mobility providers including taxis and limousine services (both premium and shared), jitneys, small bus services, carsharing, car clubs, bike sharing, ride-sharing, special transport services, etc. But it can also - and we think this is important for both a service and strategic perspective - be modulated to serve car drivers with information on routing, parking availability, etc.
Want to walk, run or skate. No problem. Clik2 can help you there as well.
Clik2 - the traveler's friend.
Back to top
| How it works (partial draft entry as place keeper. More, better follows.) | |
- Three sets of actors form the system:
- Those who would travel,
- Those ways that can get them to where they wish to go, and
- The IT /logistics/accounting that pulls the whole thing together.
- Let's assume that everyone has a mobile. (Leaving the problem for the time being of how to get them in the hands of people who don't (yet), but bearing in mind that this is going to take say two years to be turned into a finished, tested product, I think we will be able to be smart enough when the time comes to deal with that one.)
- And a GPS (though we can live without it in some of our early installations).
- Think iPhone just to give us a feel for this.
- And a GPS (though we can live without it in some of our early installations).
- Traveler wants to go somewhere.
- Dials xxx.
- That connects to the system. Which knows: (a) who the user is and (b) where s/he is at this moment.
- And which also knows from past interactions their real time registered travel preferences (in order for each, including such as: value of time, cost, preferred modes, etc., whatever as per past experience has been registered by this person).
- Dials xxx.
- Would-be traveler clicks in a destination code (or maybe points to it on the map that pops up)
- Then enters a desired time (of arrival of course) -- or otherwise the computer assumes that they want to travel immediately.
- All carriers are plugged in to the system: public transport, taxis, carsharing, rental cars, ride-sharing, shared bike, digital hitch-hiking, rural delivery vehicles, small bus services, etc. you name it.
- As is the e-system and live database that provides past and current data and ability to play alternative scenarios on the street network (factoring in time of day, weather, road conditions, special events, etc.)
- The system, knowing the traveler, then presents an array of travel choices in which it believes to be the normal preference order.
- Then enters a desired time (of arrival of course) -- or otherwise the computer assumes that they want to travel immediately.
- At that point the traveler either makes a reservation (with some form of guarantee of show-up, financial penalty?) or heads out without another click swinging off in the direction indicated on the access map of their preferred option.
- Once on board the carrier, the traveler "swipes" (or is swiped) at the entry their mobile, which then makes the necessary payment arrangements, as well as feeding one more bit of precious data into the shared global database. (And if he doesn't check in we can probably assume (statistically) that he walked, went to sleep, or otherwise got off the system. )That's information too.)
| Connecting New Mobility - Interim commentary, first thoughts | |
This is not virgin territory. Far from it! Bits of the puzzle can be found in many places and projects.
- Real time transit schedules available by internet or mobility phone.
- Sophisticated taxi communication, reservation, and routing systems.
- Information and reservation systems for car rental, carsharing and ride-sharing, also starting to come on line for that mobile in your pocket.
- Mapping projects for the most part still on the web but increasingly also available via mobile phones.
- And more.
And too, by way of additional example, the expanding rash of Google development projects in the sector give a feel for the quest of linking mobility and the web:
- Google Ride Finder - http://labs.google.com/ridefinder
- Transit Developers | Google Groups - http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers
- Google dynamic ridesharing.org - http://dynamicridesharing.org/
- Google Maps - http://maps.google.com/
- Google Transit - http://www.google.com/transit
As we advance in our work on Clik2, it is important of course to be fully briefed on all these corners of the challenge.
Danger: In our studies over the years of innovation projects in the sector, one noticeable pattern is that of projects which take the technology as the starting place and not the users or the market. That could well be the case in projects in this area as well. It is not a desirable starting place.
| CHARM? | |
Yes, CHARM: Computer-Helped Area-wide Regional Mobility system.
And just to show that there is no such thing as an entirely new idea under the sun, Clik2 can be traced back directly to a concept proposal first set out in May 1978 by Eric Britton to a meeting of the OECD Environment Directorate in Paris, and later that year in a public presentation to the Swedish Road Transport Institute (VTI).
The objective of the 1978 CHARM proposal was to propose an open group project to probe and then harness the emerging microcomputer technologies and telephone system innovations to provide the base for a more "free form" demand-responsive service that could eventually provide appropriately dense and flexible vehicle sharing for underserved lower density rural areas. The proposal was not followed up at the time.
SMART-DRIVE: A decade later, in 1989, an expanded and updated version of CHARM, turned up in a proposal for, once again, an open collaborative program and brainstorming effort, to the European Commission's DRIVE program. It also was not followed up.
If you click here to www.ecoplan.org/library/charm-89.pdf, you will be able to access the original proposals.
This peek back into the past, reminds us of once again of the extent to which the transportation arrangements that presently serve our cities and rural areas are so outstandingly bad that they defy all logic. Four decades after landing a man on the moon, they basically have not budged since Neil Armstrong took that "giant leap for mankind". They were bad in 1969 and have gotten steadily worse since. As things stand they violate economic efficiency, social justice, resource security, the environment, life quality, and the integrity of the planet.
Let's see if we can now get into the heart of the problem. Maybe a good Clik2 could help.
The Commons has welcomed
Europe: 8/10 rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris, France, Europe. T: +331 4326 1323
USA : 9440 Readcrest Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90210. T: +1 310 601-8468
Copyright © 1994-2008 The Commons ® Last updated on 7 October 2008