Green Mobility can be Smart

Published in Fourth Leap Magazine (11th Issue, April 2023)

Data is essential in the field of road transport. Good data on traffic flows, vehicle movement and parking spaces help urban authorities plan and manage mobility and to be able to allocate resources and infrastructure intelligently to meet mobility demands.

But traffic data is a small part of the potential for smart technology to improve our lives. In 1900, the population of vehicles in cities like London and New York were few and far between. Horse drawn carriages dominated the scene until Henry Ford’s innovation enabled the mass production of automobiles so that every person with the right means could afford motorised transport. As Ford aptly put it, “if I asked people what they wanted, we would have had faster horses”; thankfully his forward thinking changed the face of road transport.

Today, the transport sector is going through another paradigm shift, driven (no pun intended) largely by the availability of data.

Modern cities are designed for automobiles with expansive roadways and parking spaces. But that has unleashed the scourge of air pollution and greenhouse gas emission, not to mention the looming aspect of road safety and car accidents. Data has gone a long way to ameliorate these effects. Air pollution sensors located at hotspots in the city have linked the impact of air emissions from vehicles such as nitric oxide and particulates to occurrences of cases of human damage thereby allowing health agencies to work with road planners to reduce or remove traffic from affected areas with marked results. Pedestrianisation, for instance, has not only taken polluting automobiles off the street but has opened up new street side activities like food stalls, shops and play areas as well as regenerating neighbourhoods.

Road safety can be improved as well. In the 1970s, Copenhagen was an automobile-centric city. Huge public demonstrations on road safety in the early 1980s resulted in significant changes in the transportation infrastructure and in the years since it has become one of the major cycling cities in the world due to public investment in cycling infrastructure; additionally, the city’s flat terrain making it ideal for cycling. Clearly not every urban city can take follow this path but use of data can help planners design the most frequented commuting routes so that cycling and other forms of public transport can be encouraged to reduce motorised traffic clogging up highways.

GPS or global positioning systems has been the godsend for transport authorities and this technology has provided valuable information not just for motorists but also for public transport users. Gone are the days of time wasted waiting for buses to arrive if GPS can inform a person of arrival times so that he or she can plan their route according to their personal schedule. Technology like Google Earth maps, that we take so much for granted now, has given us street information that saves precious time that we can spend doing more important things.

The global economy loses billions of dollars yearly due to traffic jams. In the US alone, traffic jams cost $305 billion in 2017. Working from home reduces these traffic jams. In 2020, TomTom recorded around 387 cities reduced traffic congestion by 6-9%, further preventing losses to businesses and the economy in general. Obviously, the impact of COVID had a lot to do with the emergence of the increase in work from home statistics but as the world recovers from this devastating pandemic, will this pattern prevail as more and more people appreciate the convenience of online working and avoid the turmoil of commuting to work?

As we turn the page on a new dawning of road usage, certain trends will appear.

Private car ownership will diminish as space becomes a premium in urban centres. People will no longer wish to own cars for high taxation reasons but also because of the cost of parking. Business models like car sharing will come into play; for example, Zipcar is a car-sharing company and a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group which provides vehicle reservations to its members, billable by the minute, hour or day. Members have to pay a monthly or annual membership fee in addition to car reservations charges.

The Paris Agreement warns us of the need to reduce carbon emissions or face the dire consequences of a 2 degree rise in global temperatures and the related impacts of sea level rise, severe weather occurrences, bush fires, droughts and crop failures. The transport industry accounts for 24% of direct carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. With this in mind, the road sector has to adapt to address these challenges.

One approach has been to electrify the sector switching from fossil fuel-based petroleum to electricity produced by clean sources like renewable energy. At the end of 2020, there were 10 million electric vehicles registered in the world; although this may sound tiny compared to the overall vehicle population of 1.45 billion, the growth trend for electric vehicles is predicted to increase exponentially as climate concerns escalate. The other approach has been to find zero emission fuels like hydrogen. Hydrogen is a lightweight odourless gas that has been the pipe dream of fuel technologists to be able to harness the high energy density of this gas. The development of fuel cell engineering and chemical technology has come up with viable options of producing hydrogen as “green hydrogen” from the electrolysis of water using renewable energy like solar to ultimately achieve the status of zero emission fuel; this is a far advancement from the traditional energy intensive “brown” method of extracting hydrogen from lignite coal.

In the future, not only may we be observing a prevalence of zero emission vehicles, but also applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as we see the presence of autonomous or self-driven vehicles on the roads. A self-driving car is a vehicle that is capable of traveling without human input. By using sensors to perceive their surroundings, such as optical and thermographic cameras, radar, lidar, ultrasound/sonar, GPS, odometry and inertial measurement units, the control systems in the vehicle can interpret sensory information to create a three-dimensional model of the surroundings. Based on this model, the car identifies appropriate navigation paths, and strategies for managing traffic controls and obstacles. Currently there are no companies that are able to offer a fully autonomous ride in any conditions, on any road, with no human overseer although a lower version known as automated vehicles is available. The difference between automated and autonomous is the degree of human intervention. An automated car does not have the level of intelligence or independence that an autonomous car has. A truly autonomous car would decide on destination and route as well as control within the lanes. An automated car would follow orders about destination and route, and may only adopt some lane-keeping or car-following guidance.

The plight of modern transport is optimistic and green. Clever planning and application of smart technology is taking the sector to new heights. Speaking of which, drone technology has provided alternative means of mobility. With passenger or goods carrying drones in the airways, will a new form of transport planning and design evolve just as Henry Ford articulated concerning the predicament of horse drawn carriages? Do we need faster cars or will traffic planning of the future be air bound rather than at-grade? The future will tell.