Re*Move

Imagination – Is the Segway the point at which it stops?

People are constrained by their imaginations.

I’ve begun to question whether really new and radical ideas are ever likely to catch on anymore, simply because people have a fixed idea of what something ‘should be’, rather than judging the individual merits of the actual invention.  When a technology is really disruptive, or requires new infrastructure and behaviour, it can take forever to (or never) catch on. Ultimately this will affect our future.

We can design and 'technologise' our way out of a million and one problems, but attitudes must change or inventions will simply go to the dogs. I think that’s why Segways don't (won't) work in the UK - the Government epitomized this lack of foresight and imagination earlier this year when it used the Highways act of 1835 to effectively ban this transportation device which was invented at the turn of the millennium. (And yes, as you may point out – there were very few cars around in 1835 to say the least…you should see what the Highways act had to say about them)

Segways are lovely, fun things to be on and technologically they're incredible. It’s easy to knock them, but when people actually try them out, they have a habit of becoming instant converts. The problem is that, like Will Self in last Sunday’s Independent, most people don't see how it would be a step forward to replace a bike with a Segway. In some respects it wouldn’t, but that misses the point, that if we’re going to remain mobile in the future, we need to start experimenting with devices like the Segway, as a possible solution to the problem of cars in cities.

Many inventions, including quite possibly the Segway, will fall by the wayside whilst we do this, but why does that mean we should give up and accept what we have at present? Imagine if we’d crushed the optimism that led to the development of a plane like Concorde, simply because it was a bit different to the type of planes flying around in the 1960s.

 (We never need that much of an excuse to shoe-horn a picture of concorde onto the blog to be honest)

In the context of the city, the Segway has not been the success its inventors had hoped for because it offers the sort of experience mainly wanted by the people who’ve already left their cars behind – people who already ride bikes. That people in cars not only carry ‘stuff’ – difficult on a Segway - but more fundamentally, are in a car precisely because they want to avoid the experiences a Segway offers – proves the device’s undoing.

Sociability, openness, and the opportunity for interaction with others, in a liberal, utopian sense is not really what cars are about. Yet no designer of ‘alternative transportation’ seems to have grasped that people buy cars because they want to be enclosed, cocooned, cut-off. A car is utterly antisocial on one level. It's exclusive. Driving a car, you're a member of a special, successful club. What is often credited as Margaret Thatcher’s quotation about this clearly still rings true:

“A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure”

(I have one year left until I'm deemed a failure…)

The other oft-missed point is that people very rarely buy cars for practical reasons. Fundamentally, they buy what they want – it’s an emotive, not a rational process, buying a car. Which all suggests that the current generation of car driver is unlikely to ever ‘get’ a device like the Segway. They don’t want one because they see it as pointless, and until designers start developing solutions to the problems of mobility that people actually 'want', this situation is unlikely to change.

Imagination - designers, the public, politicians - we could all do with being a little more open minded.

Posted on 28th November 2006 by Joseph Simpson

4x4s to reduce CO2 emissions shocker?!

A tongue in cheek entry for Monday afternoon this.

We were very amused to read the story doing the rounds in the motoring press about a VW Touareg managing to tow a 747 plane along a runway, and we thought it made an amusing antidote to all the 'green' stuff we’ve been citing lately.

But then we remembered something that we’d seen a couple of months back that Richard Branson had said. Talking about his mission to reduce Virgin’s aeroplane CO2 emissions, the virgin website states:

“At the heart of its vision is the creation of ‘starting grids’ for all aircraft departures. A starting gird is a holding area, close to the runway… it means that aircraft can be towed closer to a runway before take-off, substantially reducing the time that engines need to be running.”

So by using 'tugs' to pull aeroplanes up to the start of the runway prior to take-off, rather than aeroplanes taxi-ing under their own steam, Branson’s theory is that you’d actually save a shed-load of carbon emissions. His estimate is that it would cut on the ground emissions at Heathrow by 50%, and at JFK by 90%.

So my question is this: Would a massively torquey diesel 4x4 such as the V10 diesel Touareg used in this experiment actually be a cleaner thing to tug planes around than the traditional ground tugs used for push-back? Who knows, but surely the thought of a bunch of 4x4s hauling 747s around Heathrow is an amusing enough concept for someone to investigate? Then there you’d have it. 4x4s saving the planet. What ever next?!

Posted on 27th November 2006. Joseph Simpson is researching the future of the car in the city at London's Royal College of Art and is a researcher at The Movement Design Bureau

Space: the next 100 years

My good friend Nick Booth has lent me his book, "Space: the next 100 years". He wrote it in 1990 to make sense of the past and future of space travel. I love old books because time is the best judge of almost anything so it's easier for me to have a view on an old book and to use it to make sense of where we are.

It's Nick's only copy and I'm very privileged that he wanted me to read it. The inside cover has a handwritten note, dated exactly 16 years and one day ago, dedicating this particular copy to his parents.

The timing for me is interesting.

15+ years is an amount of time in which our type of society thinks quite a lot can change. It's like if I, right now, was doing a piece on the automobile of 2021 – I'd have some leeway to be bold. So I'm able to genuinely read this book from a point in the future when enough has happened - and enough has changed - to see where we're at.

This book was published right at the end of the cold war and the difficulty in resolving how that would change things makes it a brave endeavour. For me its most profound implication could be that our space exploration and capabilities to date have driven two things: it created the environmental movement, or at least provided a lens through which we were able to see our entire world as something fragile and alone and something that deserved to be looked after. 16 years on, we're seeing this have enormous implications, as climate change now has a massive, largely consensual impact on political and corporate policymaking.

It helped me realise, too, that the space race of the '50s and '60s was actually about missiles. In many ways it was a sport for the two superpowers, in which they could demonstrate their technical capabilities, have fun and motivate their engineers to deliver to the extreme. Rather like the way car companies today use Formula One.

Perhaps the finest case study in motivation of all time, the reality was the space race was a way in which the two powers could continue to war over who could build the biggest launch vehicles. Apollo was many things to mankind but at a technical level it was - and remains - the biggest and most impressive missile ever built. Hell, it didn't just deliver a payload (read bomb) to the moon - it delivered people (an invasion force).

Of course, what's changed today is that a missile isn't required to deliver a bomb. An airliner can do that, in extreme by a hijacking but more commonly because it is now far easier and cheaper to get about. That's a whole other discussion, but my point is that missiles don't really have the potency they did.

Another curiosity was that Bush senior was in charge at the time. But it could have been Junior, going by this quote in a 1989 Observer newspaper editorial:

"President Bush's 'masterplan' for revitalising America's space hopes, outlined [on the' twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing] has been received with deserved lack of enthusiasm. His plan - to complete the orbiting US space station Freedom, construct a moon base and then send an expedition to Mars - was high in rhetoric and low in budgetary detail. Many experts had heard it all before."

Something that hit me for the first time was how much satellite technology now helps us understand changes going on to the planet. This was all starting to happen in the early '90s in a big way. In the end this clearer understanding, observation and transparency in relation to our climate will be a good thing. But somewhere in between, I can't help wonder whether today we're in a paranoid feedback loop, akin to the way CCTV footage today engenders fear and leaves us profoundly uncomfortable about where this technology will lead.

There are lots of other ideas here that I hope to explore in future. But for now it highlighted one thing. We need to find a better way of getting people and goods up and down from there. After that, anything is possible. Those who seek right now to go to Mars still live in a world of missiles. A proper and scaleable way to move up and down into space is the next thing that needs to happen. We need a railroad into space - and then we can work out the rest.

Posted by Mark Charmer. Mark is director of The Movement Design Bureau.

Can anyone make money pleasing the general public?

Frank Rose, in December's Wired highlights how user generated marketing, if left unchecked, can lead to fascinating things.

The case study is curious, though, in that the product in question is the Chevrolet Tahoe, an enormous SUV which is so astonishingly unsophisticated that Rose reports GM is rumoured to make about $10,000 per vehicle in clear profit. Which is useful, given its pension bill.

Of course any fool with a big enough ad budget can sell a product or service. Likewise, as with spending on R&D, the best products and services don't actually need a big ad budget, so are inherently more profitable.

Rose touches on another interest point.

I find that if you ever suggest that California could become the next Detroit, Americans raise their hands in horror. They associate it with decay, whereas I always think of it as motor city and meant Silicon Valley could reinvent the car. And Rose dismisses Detroit too:

Detroit is not a place you associate with revolution, in advertising or anything else. It's been three quarters of a century since the spirit of innovation held sway here, and the decline of the US auto industry is writ large in the streets.

Of course this ignores the revolutionary impact of Motown, which took the ethos of industrial production and applied it, with panache, to the music industry. It was a promising dawn, but one where the industry that won out was actually that of media, rather than music.

Speaking of both music and Chevy Tahoe, the mythical line of the GM auto exec who quipped that noone ever lost money underestimating the sophistication of the general public has been proven over again through the years, as the likes of Colin Chapman and Andre Citroen learned to their cost.

The question is whether this might change. Rose seems to hint that eventually the user generated content, reviews and campaigns will lead to better products than long-standing centralised forms of promotion and control have delivered.

I hope he's right.

Posted by Mark Charmer

Could “All out War on 4x4 cars” change the game?

Despite the protestations of various political parties and certain sections of the media, last night's report in the London Evening Standard that Mayor Ken Livingstone plans to restructure the congestion charge, shows that he’s rather astute in my opinion.

What also seems to have been missed by many is that this change in policy comes just a few short weeks after TfL abandoned its in-car pay as you drive black box trials, because the system wasn’t accurate enough and didn’t work reliably…could the two be connected I wonder?

For those who haven’t heard, Livingstone is suggesting that by 2009:
- C-charge to remain the same for cars falling into Road tax (VED) bands C, D, E & F at £8.
- C-charge abolished for all vehicles in VED bands A & B.
- C-charge for vehicles in VED band G to be increased from £8 to £25, with those living in the congestion charge zone, who are currently entitled to a 90% discount, having this privilege withdrawn.

To contextualise, the VED bands are based on vehicle Carbon dioxide per kilometer emissions; bands A & B are anything up to 120g/km, whilst band G is anything over 225g/km. The Standard declared that it was tantamount to “all out war on Chelsea tractors”, and many have moaned that it simply penalises the well off middle-classes (most amusingly put by spoof motoring website Sniffpetrol). I’m of the opinion it makes sense.

The objections raised by autocar, that this penalises people with big families who need big cars doesn’t exactly hold up. Yes, many petrol MPVs such as V6 Ford Galaxys and Renault Espaces fall into the higher band, but the diesel versions don’t. Furthermore, assuming you’ve not got 5 children, Renault has just launched a new Megane diesel, which falls into band B and would be exempt from the charge – so there are cars in the ‘free’ bands which aren’t micro city cars.

Livingstone’s intention is to punish people in the wallet for what they’re driving – in the hope they’ll think more carefully about their car buying decisions. It won’t necessarily result in them not buying a 4x4, but it might push them into the more efficient diesel model, with the benefit of much lower carbon emissions than if they’d chosen the large capacity petrol (4x4 haters might be dismayed to find that most midsize diesel 4x4s aren’t in band G and so won’t get hit with the higher charge).

The effect of this is two fold. Firstly, at a local level, CO2 emissions should fall, as more people switch to efficient, predominantly diesel models. It has the neat added benefit of recognising cars purely on their emissions level rather than technology, hence models such as Lexus’s GS450h (favoured ride of David Cameron MP for Witney) will no longer be C-Charge exempt purely because they’re hybrid, as they are, somewhat anomalously, at the moment.

The second potential benefit has much wider implications. As buyers jump to cheaper, more efficient models, the car manufacturers will be squeezed hard. Currently they make very little profit on small or diesel engined models, but large petrol 4x4’s are the industry’s biggest cash-cow. In theory then, as people demand and switch to more efficient engines, there is an incentive for manufacturers to come up with more efficient, lower emission vehicles.

Currently there’s very little push to do this, indeed European auto manufacturers are currently trying to wriggle out of a commitment made in Kyoto that it’s average fleet CO2/km levels would be at 140g/km or below by 2008.  Most of them are currently missing this target by miles.  Yet they have the technology to hit these targets now. Livingstone knows this, and is effectively creating a situation where consumer demand drives it to happen. And yes, one might argue that one city alone will have little impact on car giant’s sales and profits, but should Ken persuade some of his friends from other cities who are involved with the Clinton Global City Mayors Initiative to follow London suit, then the auto industry will have to take note. Will this happen? I wouldn’t bet against it – Livingstone isn’t afraid of a fight.

Joseph Simpson is researching the future of the car in the city at London's Royal College of Art.

BA on airport expansion

The Royal Aeronautical Society hosted a lecture last night featuring British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh. The theme was Heathrow and its future - a wider topic that we plan to explore early next year in a debate that examines London's ongoing discomfort with LHR, its near neighbour, which is a metropolis in itself.

Last night's speech covered more predictable ground but it was significant in that Walsh came out guns blazing on the point that if investment doesn't continue into airport infrastructure then the UK economy will suffer.

  The implications are greater of course, in that if airport investment reduces we'll end up being stuck with a creeping antiquation of our air travel infrastructure and the curious situation where we could produce more CO2 per passenger and slow the development of new aircraft and flight technologies.

That's a tough argument to put forward, of course, as it requires a step beyond obvious (and necessary) response number 1 - taxation on air travel.

See The Guardian's reports on his comments on Walsh's speech here. 

Incidentally, there's a useful event going on at the Royal Aeronautical Society on 14th December exploring "how if the engineering community, governments and the operating industry give the subject sufficient priority, the improved environmental performance of air transport could more than offset the projected growth of air traffic over the next 50 years".  There's a flyer here. Posted by Mark

Defining issues of our age - will blogging transform transport?

My dad and I got talking the other week about the state of the nation. By which I mean the UK. The catch is that he and my mum now live in Spain - yes I am one of George Monbiot's 'Love Miles' children.

A diet of Sky News and the Daily Mail can make for an interesting take on Britain, as can my strange world immersed in central London and all things to do with the future of movement, new technology and the jigsaw puzzle of movers, shakers and quakers.

In a particularly philosophical moment we got onto 'defining issues of our age'. The defining issue was, I said:

How to adapt the political process, the mechanisms of media accountability and the process of social engagement (connecting citizens, businesses and interest groups) to a less centralised, potentially more inclusive process of enquiry, representation, decision-making and accountability. Crucially the objective must be to get more things done in order to tackle the various high and low priority issues of our time.

Interested to know what people think. For now I hope this helps explain why we'll be tracking developments in decentralised but collaborative decision-making. This shift is very significant for the future of how we move from place to place, from Heathrow to Houston. It's something I hope we can follow with you.

On a related topic, Technorati has just released its latest figures on blogging. There's an analysis piece here on BBC Online. The quote by Technorati's founder David Sifry interests me most:

"'Some of these are fully-fledged professional enterprises that post many, many times per day and behave increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media. The impact of these bloggers on our cultures and democracies is increasingly dramatic,' said Mr Sifry."

Posted by Mark

Free flight - could it free air travel again?

In the wake of growing political, NGO and media pressure here in the UK on air travel, I've been applying some more thought to the subject.

A conversation on Tuesday with Joris Melkert in the aviation research group at TU Delft encouraged me to dig around on the topic of 'Free Flight'. That institute's assertion that aviation can be organised more efficiently is obvious to anyone who wonders why it takes two hours to check a passenger's identity, put them through one aeroplane door and their bag through another.

The tricky question right now is whether pushing for greater efficiency in the way that aircraft interact with airports will become a higher or lesser priority as the likelihood increases that air travel will be taxed and airport expansion discouraged.

So what is free flight?
The idea of free flight has been around for some time but let me explain it in MDB language. Planes spend a lot of time not going where they need to - be it sitting in queues on the ground, flying wide approach patterns and descending or climbing in a manner that is far slower than what the aircraft can actually do in sheer performance terms. Imagine, the theory goes, if planes could fly directly, very efficiently to their destination, without queues and stacks and holding. It's all akin to a crazy computer game which allows much more to go on at once, mixing things together and spitting them out where they need to be - a sort of air-lanes internet.

There are a bunch of technologies that could rewrite the rules of air traffic flow from this perspective - check out this BusinessWeek article from a few years ago..

BW Online | February 3, 2003 | Free Flight: An Internet for the Skies: ""

The strange bit is that when you start to think like this it points to the potential need for MORE airport infrastructure. If you have more runways, planes can spend less time holding in the air. And if you design the runway patterns differently - so planes don't have so far to taxi when they land or take off - you can cut emissions around airports. If you can transform approach patterns planes can descend and climb far more rapidly or come in all kinds of directions, reducing the flightpath 'footprint'.

The 2003 BW article above presents Europe as ahead here, but whether Europe, the US or Asia will lead the charge now is an open question. Given that when I explain to Americans that Europe is currently in the midst of aviation angst they are shocked - it's just not on the agenda in the same way there. Of course distances are much greater and psychologically America has long been wedded to the easy hop on, hop off nature of air travel. The lack of a feasible alternative, such as a TGV train, means it's harder to just argue that short haul air travel should be abandoned because of its CO2 emissions. America will have to find a solution. Europeans have an alternative to flying that those in the USA don't. My hunch is that it will be a defining factor in who solves the problem. It just needs to happen more quickly before we decide instead to constrain an inadequate, outdated system.

As I've said before if we don't tackle this problem more imaginatively, we risk filling the air with circling, inefficient aircraft, waiting to squeeze into under-designed congested airfields.

The defining question needs to be not how we curb air travel but how we redesign it so it can continue to expand without an escalating contribution to climate change.

Mark Charmer is director of The Movement Design Bureau and a founder of The Energy Age Consortium.