Technology enabling new mobility

This article is from the CW Journal archive.

The car industry is scared. It’s frightened the car will go the way of the horse – becoming something that is taken out occasionally, purely as a leisure activity. Government and policy-makers take the opposite view, hoping this is the future and believing it will lead to fewer roads, less pollution and a safer environment. Current guidelines for house-building in London specify one parking space for every five houses, with future plans for many fewer.

Technology will be key to keeping people and their personal transport on the road. One of the experts in the field is Joseph Seal-Driver, entrepreneur in residence at InMotion Ventures, an investment arm of the Jaguar Land Rover organisation that sponsors future technologies. Seal-Driver’s job is to look at how technology can be used  to open up new possibilities. 

He explains that one of the first projects was how to share ‘car keys’ using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. Using the new car club model, customers no longer needed to carry keys, they could let themselves into a car with an RFID signal. The advent of smartphones and apps that use near field communication (NFC) and RFID provided a means for rental firms to allow cars to be picked up anywhere they were parked. This has completely removed the need to have a central office with acres of car parking spaces. Extending this to the future, we will see the possibility of peer to peer car sharing where private car owners can offer their vehicles for short-term rental, massively increasing the utilisation of private vehicles.

Making the software and connectivity robust is essential to these new business models. Seal-Driver cites the case of
the DriveNow service which had a consistent, customer-facing front-end but relied on between three and five systems working in sync. This was generally reliable but a single failure could lock a customer out of a car, making redundancy an important aspect of system design. 

Coverage is similarly important with rental bicycles that can be left anywhere, rather than needing to be docked at specific locations – such as London’s ‘Boris’ bikes. Dockless bicycles are typically pinged every 30 minutes or so to pinpoint where they are. Location experiments purely based on the app in the current rider’s phone showed that bikes were often moved when not being tracked, and the bike could be lost. A typical example would be a rider leaving a bike at the front of a pub and someone moving it around to the back. Using bicycle-based locators means powering the connection becomes an issue: some bikes have rechargeable batteries which are swapped out, while others use solar panels. Trying to balance how much data to send, and how often, against battery life has led to Cambridge-based experiments with Sigfox and LoRaWAN; and NB-IoT in China; but these trials are very much in their early days.

It’s clear that Mobility-as-a-Service fulfils many people’s needs. It’s about the arrival not the travelling, and mixed modes of transport creates options – but to get them to work well means opening up data and this poses challenges to business models. 

The ability to take a dockless bike to a railway station, catch a train and have an Uber taxi waiting at the destination blurs the concept of public transport. TravelSpirit, a not-for-profit community, looks at open standards and sharing of transportation data, but the proprietary needs of private businesses cause complications. A dockless bicycle hire company might be very happy to contribute its data when it is the only one sharing bike data within a community. If a competitor joins, it won’t be so keen to share information that shows where the most profitable pick-up places are located. Sharing data can effectively lead to unintentionally revealing customer lists.

Door to door travel-planning apps also create dilemmas. If the app has a lot of users in a particular area, it may balance demand for individual services by giving different routes to different people making the same journey to avoid disappointment. This poses a ‘greater good’ problem of choosing who gets the optimum journey and who gets the inferior routes. In addition, a travel-planning app that generates revenue from service recommendations – similar to insurance comparison sites – may give in to the temptation to recommend services that pay more rather than those providing the optimum route. The solutions are likely to be based on commercial interests rather than on the user benefits.

The new transport systems are likely to bring new spins on all kinds of problems. In the future, if someone attending a meeting orders an autonomous taxi, similar to the Johnny cab in the Total Recall movie, they might ask it to circle the building until the meeting ends – much as a rich Harrods’ shopper does with their chauffeur-driven ride. But, what if the meeting is a conference with hundreds of delegates all ordering circling Johnny cabs? New solutions will be needed to solve these new problems.

One pioneering company which is tackling these issues is Citymapper, which has become exceptionally adept at taking in data from multiple sources and cleaning it. The data mining done by Citymapper to analyse the routes customers look up and take has revealed areas where there is a lack of service but no shortage of customers. In response Citymapper sought to launch its own bus service to fill these gaps, running in the whitespace of the Transport for London (TfL) network. 

In the 1800s, omnibuses were initially run by private ventures competing on the same routes and stealing each other’s passengers but turnpike tolls and the Locomotive Act (aka the Red Flag Act) literally slowed the development of services. Two centuries later, the regulatory mindset seems to be little changed. Citymapper failed to get regulatory approval for its full bus service and now runs Smartride, something closer to a minibus taxi with a fixed ‘hunting’ area.

When a Citymapper app user in a Smartride area asks to book a seat, the app shows a nearby pick-up point within walking distance. It will then take them, along with other passengers sharing the ride, to a place not too far from the requested destination. The service is as convenient as a taxi and, at £3 a ride with regular incentive discounts, not much more expensive than a bus. It even has USB charging points built into the seats.

TfL itself has boosted London’s transport by opening up travel data access but, while TfL is one of the most progressive organisations, public transport organisations generally are set in their ways when it comes to payment methods, working to different key performance indicators, and tied into tendering processes that can get in the way of disruptive innovation – they also tend to be very slow to integrate new models. 

Car share schemes, like Smartride, have been shown to significantly reduce the need for car ownership but city planners have been reluctant to integrate them with traditional services.

Ford Bikes

In looking at new mobility models, Ford is considering integrating bicycles with cars where electic bikes are charged-up in the back of a transit van.

Lack of pressure from regulators reduces the immediate worries of the car industry but the manufacturers can see that the days when getting to work meant jumping into your car and driving there could be coming to a close. Some are now looking at other forms of transport, such as electric bicycles. 

Peugeot has its roots in manufacturing bicycles; Mercedes owns Smart, a well-established car and electric bicycle maker; and Ford is working with a consortium of bike companies.

At Mobile World Congress 2016, Ford showed two prototype bicycle designs within a concept it calls MoDe:Me. These comprise a 15kg consumer version and a 20kg ‘Pro’ model. The idea is that each will fit in a Ford vehicle where they will be kept charged-up and can be easily unpacked for use. The consumer MoDe:Me is designed for commuters and can be folded up in a Ford Focus, while two MoDe:Me Pro bikes, with their wheels removed, fold into a Ford Transit van. 

One use case that Ford foresees for the Pro involves a delivery van from which two people can unpack packages for delivery onto the bikes and make deliveries while the autonomous van moves to a convenient rendezvous point where the unloaded bikes can marry up with it and move on to the next distribution point. The bikes’ batteries are removable – with the consumer bike having them as part of the seat post – so the Focus or Transit could have a spare on charge.

The initial prototypes have been built at Ford’s Dunton Technical Centre near Basildon, Essex, and introduce a number of new technologies. A good proportion of the design was produced using 3D printers and a variety of the new print techniques, including sintering and forced-deposition modelling.

The Pro bikes’ motive force is also innovative with the use of a toothed belt allowing the wheels to be removed to stow the bikes into the back of the van – catering for a conventional chain drive would be messy. A toothed belt is also quieter but there are no derailleur gears so the prototypes are ‘fixies’ with no freewheeling capability. Chief design engineer Tom Thompson told CW Journal that he’s excited by possible future developments afforded by a new generation of combined motors and gearboxes which can be fitted into the wheel hub.

While future vehicles can use electric, petrol or muscle power, the real driving force behind city transports of the
future is data. Data will determine how people are moved and will inform the planning systems for regulators and developers.