The bus you drive to your door
Flash out your credit card and you're off. Ruth Brandon on a public transport plan that truly stacks up
Published: 23 January 2007
Transport planners and environmentalists exhort us to abandon our cars and use public transport. And given that 40 per cent of petrol use in New York is from cars driving around looking for parking spaces, many drivers might in principle agree. But, in practice, public transport has too many drawbacks. In particular, it won't take you door to door. And most people's lives are now literally built around door-to-door wheels.
But what if public transport could in some way be reinvented? That is the problem the Smart Cities group at MIT Media Lab set itself, looking for solutions in which embedded intelligence might make both cities and vehicles part of an organic whole.
The result is the electric CityCar, being developed in association with GM. To look at, it's not unlike a Smart, with a Smart's wheelbase and a similar shape. But unlike Smarts, CityCars fold up, into half their extended wheelbase, and stack, like supermarket trolleys, recharging as they wait for a new user.
The idea is to place stacks outside railway stations, supermarkets - wherever people need a car to take them on the next stage of the journey. You would swipe a credit card and help yourself from the charging point at the front of the stack. If you drove the CityCar home, you could recharge it there; if you lived in a city with charging strips in the road, the car would recharge whenever it was stationary - for example, at a traffic light. And so long as you stayed in the city, one of the main drawbacks to electric cars - their low range between battery charges - would immediately be overcome.
Another problem with electric cars is the enormous increase in energy demand that would take place if everyone drove them. But with renewable energy such as wind and solar, where supply is intermittent and storage is always a problem, stacks of CityCars could act as a great well of storage capacity for the electric grid, taking power when it was available and storing it for use when needed. In effect, the city then becomes a power plant, where energy and mobility are coupled.
Existing microcars tend to be cramped - especially when large batteries must also be accommodated. But CityCars are roomy when extended, with the head and legroom of a 3-Series BMW. The secret is in the wheels. Engine, steering, suspension, brakes - everything essential to driving is packed into them, with a simple mechanical connection to the body. The result, with no bulky drivetrain to accommodate, is far more room for passengers. The group has done away with steering wheels, preferring virtual handlebars that take up no space and can't impale you if you crash. It might even be possible to drive using simple body movements - by the seat of the pants.
CityCars are sensationally manoeuvrable. Drive-by-wire omnidirectional wheels mean they can turn on their own axis, and drive sideways into a parking space. And since you don't actually need to be inside the car to drive it, but can direct operations from outside, that parking space could be very small indeed.
Since the car is effectively a computer system, GPS would be integral; if block-by-block road pricing were in force, you would know the cost in real time, taking shorter, dearer routes only if you were in a hurry. There would be wireless connection for personal computers, as well as plenty of room to work on them. And - as with a car club - if the thing went wrong, the repairs wouldn't be your problem.
So what are we waiting for? Well, a few things. This is a car for the wired city, a concept that may well be the future, but is far from being the present. But that's merely a matter of time. More intractable is human nature. Is it feasible to make desirable, expensive individual units such as the CityCar the basis of a public transport system?
With car clubs, the operator knows who's been using what and when, and who made the mess: repeat offenders can be barred. But that won't be true of CityCars, in a world where credit cards are routinely cloned. And what if - as will inevitably happen - people leave stuff inside the cars when they return them? Such as the computer they've just been using?
But these are quibbles. The kind of creative thinking that puts the engine in the wheels will doubtless address them. More importantly, thinking like this makes public transport a feasible proposition even for the low-density suburbs. We aren't there yet. But we're on the way.
