Moving Waves

Ride Sharing app SideCar - now in Washington DC

2013-03-27T15:25:00.001Z

Described in this article. Would like to write more, especially about how it deal with trust/fear issues, but can't right now. May come back to this.

Whipcar (P2P car sharing) closes its doors

2013-03-12T12:28:00.000Z

Explained here - shame, was a nice idea, but looks like it was too hard to do, at least as a profit-making business. Wonder if there is scope for a non-profit approach?

JoinUp Taxi Sharing service

2013-03-05T16:22:00.000Z

There were quite a few things related to sustainable transport at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but one that I particularly liked was JoinUp, a taxi-sharing service from Spain. It's based on using smartphones (Android and iOS) to enable potential taxi users to share a ride. It has all the same 'trust architecture' that you'd expect, including social feedback on both drivers and other ride-sharers. It's possible for women sharers to specify that they'd only share with another woman (though exactly how they'd avoid real creeps creating a female identity is not entirely clear to me). The service is free to users - taxi drivers pay 1 Euro to the company for each trip arranged via the service.

Taxi companies in Barcelona (200 cars) and Madrid (250 cars) are already signed up. Informal taxi-sharing has existed for a long time, especially in developing countries - in more mature and affluent settings the taxi drivers have not been too keen, perhaps because it seems to them that they are getting only one fare when two were available.

That's not a barrier in present-day Spain; here it's more a matter of getting half a fare rather than none at all. It's worth noting that there seems to be a real culture of innovation in sharing-based services in Spain at the moment; no doubt this is due to the dire economic climate, but it is great that it's driving some clever ideas rather than just a race to the bottom.

Russian motorists all have dashboard cameras, because...

2013-02-16T11:21:00.001Z

Interesting post in Wired explaining how come there is so much footage of the Siberian meteor strike from inside cars. Suggests that there, at least, another building block for some sort of integrated transport intelligent system is already in place. Curiously, it's there because of the failure of policy rather than its success.

Interactive bus stops (NFC enabled) reach my neighborhood

2013-01-18T14:42:00.000Z

As shown in this post on a local community website/blog.

But what are they for? What can I do at an interactive bus stop that I can't do at a normal one?

Well it could be information via my smartphone...oh, hang on, I can already get that.

Real-time map of London Underground trains

2013-01-15T15:36:00.000Z

At last. You may remember an earlier post, from the days when this blog was young, about a real-time map showing Swiss railway trains. You might even remember that mashup actually used timetable information rather than real data, but that in Switzerland there's not much difference.

This London one actually uses live data from the TfL API, which is much more cool on several levels - especially since in London using the timetable as a substitute for real data wouldn't be very good. It is really great that TfL seems to have gone so far in making its data available to developers - exactly as we called for in our report a couple of years ago.

I was about to be my usual snide self and point out that it wouldn't be possible to use the map when you are actually on the underground, but these days quite a few stations have WiFi, so this is really starting to come together. Two cheers for TFL, and three for the app developers!

And an extra cheer for David Bradshaw, for telling me about this via Facebook.

Car accident? There's an app for that...

2013-01-04T13:07:00.000Z

Have a look here. Funny how the main website picture shows a glamorous woman rather than a car accident though...especially since that's there business. Funny how she's speaking on the phone too; doesn't the app take care of that sort of thing?

Google moving into connected car apps with Hyundai and Kia

2013-01-04T13:02:00.001Z

No specific sustainability angle to this article, even though it's about ITC and mobility - but can't help thinking that Google has the kind of clout needed to make things actually happen, unlike some of the telco players with connected car ambitions.

The big boys are starting to move into mobility-as-a-service

2013-01-04T11:55:00.001Z

As this article about Avis's purchase of Zipcar shows. This can only be good news, surely - by helping to make the paradigm much more well established. Of itself it won't get people out of cars, of course - but it does establish much more clearly the link between travel and costs, because you don't have thousands of pounds of sunk costs sitting outside the front of your house. And by putting a teensy-weensy barrier between the travel need and the automatic decision to get in the car, it might help with behaviour change. At the very least, it ought to make for fewer actual cars parked by the sides of roads because shared cars are used more efficiently.

E112 - a small personal note

2013-01-02T08:52:00.002Z

Just returned from a holiday in France, where we hired a car with all the latest in satnav, built-in tracking, and so on. On a mountain-side near Chamonix we hit a patch of black ice and went into a skid. We hit the roadside wall, bounced off and skidded back into the road, and finally came to a stop further down the road. Despite serious fear of death at the time (beyond the roadside wall there was a long drop into the valley) there were no serious consequences. There were no other vehicles involved, the car was still drive-able afterwards, and there were no injuries.

Nevertheless, the inbuilt tracking device decided to make an emergency call and send our GPS-determined location to the emergency services, even though the airbags did not inflate. Exactly as described here. The satnav display told us this. I've no idea what it said to the emergency services, but absolutely nothing else happened. No emergency vehicles turned up, no emergency response centre talked to us. As it turned out, that was all for the best, because I don't speak much French and couldn't have described the accident to anyone. But what would have happened if it had been a more serious accident? Would the system have done anything else? Somehow I don't have much confidence.

Green Party report on Road Pricing to replace congestion charge in London

2012-09-14T12:21:00.001+01:00

Once again, this is something I ought to have noticed early but didn't. Sorry. Here is a link to an article in The Guardian describing the report, which was commissioned by Green members of the London Assembly. You can download the report itself here.

Of course, this sort of thing is a utopian fantasy, which could only work in the minds of Green politicians - or in places run with a degree of sensible urban planning, like Singapore (see picture).

Car2Go arrives in the UK

2012-08-24T09:34:00.001+01:00

In Birmingham, to be precise. It's more or less a car club, but interesting because (a) it's owned by Daimler, and is thus a sign of the car industry pursuing new kinds of 'car-as-a-service' business model and (b) because it doesn't require users to return the cars to designated bays. The scheme is backed by the city council, the pay-as-you-go fee includes parking charges (and fuel, and everything else as far as I can see), and you can leave the vehicle in any public parking space. There are 250 cars at the start.

Crowd-sourced database about accessibility

2012-07-16T16:17:00.005+01:00

Here at Gogenie - still looks more like a project than a product.

PAYD insurance on the rise in the UK

2012-07-16T16:16:00.001+01:00

According to this article published on AOL. The British Insurance Brokers' Association report to which it refers is much-quoted but hard to find. Here's the BIBA press release, but even that doesn't have a link to the report.

Smarter Mobility solution in Lyon

2012-06-29T09:36:00.002+01:00

Developed by IBM, public transport operator Veolia Transdev, and the city authorities. Described here. Sounds really rather cool, with personal travel assistant and all. Transdev also has more stuff on its website about Urban Pulse, its own location based app, which deserves a separate post.

Behaviour change - methodology wars

2012-06-11T15:31:00.003+01:00

Nothing like a good fight between models, is there? Well, not really. Everybody is being super-polite, as described in this article here. But underlying the politeness there is an important point: how much effort is it worth putting in to trying to persuade people to change their behaviour? I like the advocates of behaviour change more, but I'm sceptical about the long term benefits. I see how hard it is to change behaviour, and how it's even harder to sustain those benefits; in the absence of consistent labour-intensive nudging behaviour tends to slip back to the norm and the habitual. And it's funny how it transfers the onus on to those least able to have an impact, and takes responsibility away from industry and government, who have so much more influence.

Social networking and travel behaviour

2012-05-18T16:24:00.000+01:00

A study into whether social networks can help change travel behaviour. A bit underwhelming really...interviews with two developers, a focus group, and an online survey with 141 users. And inconclusive results: "...They seem likely to increase awareness of the impact of travel behaviours and of more sustainable alternatives. This may not lead to a direct change in travel behaviours, but it potentially impacts on attitudes and values that could change travel behaviours in the longer term."

Curiously, this paper appears to suggest that people with more members in their social network travel more.

Seminar on self driving vehicles

2012-05-01T18:23:00.000+01:00

The Royal Institute of Navigation and the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network of the UK Technology Strategy Board held a seminar on this subject at the University of Nottingham in March. There is a detailed write-up of the discussions and presentations here. Lots of interesting stuff, including contacts, descriptions of research and testing, and so on. Personally I don't see much here that addresses the chair's opening remark that "Vehicle automation may have a role to play in addressing major road transport challenges of safety, pollution, and congestion." Some of what is being reported here may eventually translate into products and services, or technologies, that impact on the sustainability of transport, but it is not immediately obvious hor - at least not to me.The military applications seem a lot nearer.

A good crop of public transport coverage roll-outs

2012-04-20T09:31:00.000+01:00

WiFi on buses, wifi on underground trains, that sort of thing. Like here, on Switzerland's PostBuses, where it will be free to passengers. And here, on the Moscow Metro Ring Line. Moscow is clearly the place for free WiFi while you travel on public transport, because you can have it on regional buses too, as described here. In Vinnitsia (Ukraine) it's the trams that have free WiFi (well, five of the 120 trams), in Vienna it's the airport bus.

Social driver behaviour platform from Telefonica and Masternaut

2012-04-10T10:18:00.001+01:00

We've written before about social driver behaviour apps - Nissan Carwings is one obvious example. It's nice to see a big telco pushing one,though - as described here. Telefonica have partnered with Masternaut, a telematics supplier, to offer a a product which stretches from fleet management (which Telefonica has adopted in its own vehicles) to individual driver monitoring and 'game' features, like fuel saving league tables.

And while we are on the subject of Telefonica, it deserves an honorable mention for its participation in the BeyWatch building management project too - nothing to do with transport, but a nice example of ICT helping carbon reduction.

Bicycle hire schemes again

2012-04-05T14:25:00.003+01:00

A link to a report, and a good overview of current projects, including a description of the Onroll system operating in Spain, which seems to work using text messaging to lock and unlock the bikes - good idea.

Dynamic tolling on roads in Virginia, USA

2012-04-05T14:19:00.001+01:00

Let's assume that the dateline is of no consequence, and that this is a serious proposal. Dynamic tolling actually quite an interesting idea - perhaps we'll see it in the UK once the government has sold our roads to companies who want to turn them into profit centres.

WiFi coverage on London Underground platforms

2012-03-15T13:19:00.001Z

At last, courtesy of Virgin Media, and described here. Reading this and the gushing comment by the 'mayor' of London you would think that this was ground-breaking, rather than a catch-up with what is available in most mass transit systems and underground railways around the world from Cairo to Singapore (or Dubai, as in the picture).

It will be free during the Olympics and then chargeable via a business model that is yet to be determined - the post rather implies that it will be available to Virgin customers only. If true this surely merits some sort of regulatory investigation. In most other cities that I have come across there is some sort of neutral host model, where customers of all the different operators can use the coverage.

A speed camera lottery to reward good drivers at the expense of bad ones

2012-03-14T15:07:00.002Z

Described here, with a video. What's not to like? It's just, it's fun, it rewards good behaviour and punishes bad. Especially nice since it would make Jeremy Clarkson so very, very unhappy!

P2P Foundation Wiki on car sharing

2012-03-08T20:03:00.001Z

A sort of reference article, with lots of links to examples and research - very useful as a resource for anyone starting out on a report or a new project. For those interested in transport who don't know about the Foundation, it's your lucky day. Plus another chance to use this great picture!