Congestion is First in Our Minds, Next on the Roads
The “familiar world” negates the primary basis of a city. A city is marked by its ability to intensify good quality interaction. With such slow traffic as exist in most cities or with sprawl stretching commuting distances, they fail to serve intensive interaction. If left unchecked, the increasing constraints on existing urban transport systems could work against a city as the preferred location for companies.
Further, in a causal loop with frustration over traffic delays, stressed minds due to lack of rest and for social nurturing; road accidents and missed meetings; traffic congestion affects the quality of interaction as well as the quality of our lives. Air, water, land and noise pollution due to vehicular emission further affect us as they creekily creep into our body and mind through various channels. Direct and indirect, internal and external, individually and collectively, we continue to pay a heavy price of holding on to these assumptions.
One, such assumption is that vehicles are owned and self-driven, as the most favored mode of transportation in a city. Buses and trains do not match the comfort and convenience of door-to-door travel carried out in a private vehicle, even though in many cases private vehicles are slower and definitely lots more costly than public transport alternatives. Private vehicles are self-driven as many vehicle owners cannot afford a chauffer even if they would prefer to. Many others do not wish to depend on a chauffer. Yet, on a closer look, this assumption leads to a host of problems.
As traffic gets slower and the distances get longer (as people are forced to sprawl to suburbs also as downtowns get congested), the driving times are longer and frustratingly slow. Time for which, people are incapacitated to perform other tasks. Many people are not good drivers or do not like to drive at times, but have no option. The situation is not remotely as rosy as fancy advertisements pushed on to the customer through multiple channels - on the television, in newspapers and magazines that the customer and their peers read and subcutaneously through commercial cinema- showed. Unsuspected and without help, they are captive to their own assumptions.
Whither convenience?
Many of these assumptions are linked to each other. They become enmeshed in the inscrutable complexities of urban transport to become a belief. The convenience accorded to owned vehicles is one such belief. One aspect of this convenience is that the vehicle owner can command the vehicle at their desired speed, without stoppages of a transit service where the passenger has no control over the speed at which they travel.
The belief is true only so long as the number of vehicles owned is less than the carriage capacity of roads for an optimal traffic speed. Every extra vehicle causes inconvenience to everyone else including itself. Like in the parable of the boiling frog, congestion creeps up gradually for people to sit back and notice. When they do, drivers are conditioned to look at others as causing the congestion and view themselves as victims. Any vehicle that enters a radius around their vehicle is treated as an intrusion and a threat.
This further worsens traffic congestion. Raged drivers try frequent overtakes to reach their destination faster. As many others do the same, everyone moves slower than if they followed traffic discipline. This increases the probability of a collision, which, if it happens further aggravates congestion by blocking a lane, till the time it is towed away.
In these conditions, the convenience of owned vehicle becomes a myth. The reality is that every one would be much better of if the empty seats on all the vehicles were filled up and vehicles with a higher seating capacity to space occupied on the road prevailed. Thus, with fewer vehicles on the road carrying the same traveler population, everyone will be able to move at the optimal speed.
What and who safeguards them? What happens when we learn about them and change these mental models? Let us expose the invalidity of these models that severely affect our daily lives and endanger the future of our children.
In a scenario when one individual owns a vehicle, numerous questions arise over experiments to fill up empty seats such as carpooling. How do owner-drivers find people traveling the same route at common times? How do they get compensated? At what rate do passengers pay? How much do passengers pay for a fraction of the trip? What if a passenger is absent on day/days? What if the owner-driver changes their travel plan?
To break this gridlock of juxtaposed objectives, we need to apply new knowledge and technologies in areas of “on the road” psychology, transportation data collection methodologies, wireless technologies, in-vehicle electronics and software; GIS, GPS, large scale database management, faster processing times, etc.
Based on our knowledge of these enabling technologies, many of these problems begin to dissolve. A new assumption emerges which invalidates our previous assumption of convenience accorded to owned vehicles:
Most people in a city are better off if they access vehicles rather than own them. The undistorted economics of owning a car in a city at their full cost is closer to owning private jets, or private island resorts, than of buying a hamburger or a mobile phone.
What Urban Transport users really demand?
It is possible with the application of knowledge in these areas to reduce the number of vehicles on the road and at the same time significantly reduce waiting and stoppage time associated with buses and carpools. A deeper insight into the travel experience desired by most users yields the following constellation of features that urban transport users really want.
- They want:
- Faster travel with a guaranteed door-to-door travel time;
- Seating comfort and ambience – vehicle model, noise, leg space, air-conditioning etc.
- Choice to travel with a group of favorite co-passengers or single;
- Choice to drive (with navigation support for the best route to your destination); or
- Avail of hands free comfort and flexibility to make a phone call, connect to the internet, video conference/chat, listen to music or play video games;
- Greater road safety with fewer vehicles driven by proficient drivers;
- Choice from a variety of service plans that are designed to closely meet user demand.
- They do not want:
- The inconvenience of finding a parking place;
- The trouble to take your vehicle to the fuelling station; for repair, maintenance and hire another when the private vehicle is not in service
- The high cost of owning and running a vehicle
In the following section we describe a new system that is designed based on the real needs and expectations of urban transport users. Through clear and consistent communication, it navigates quite a few mindbends and crosses several other hurdles set up by entrenched practices and vested interests, in a journey to fulfill our dreams of healthy and sustainable urban transport for all.