Sustainable micro-mobility ecosystem of the next generation
The city is a complex combination of objects designed and constructed to support people doing diverse activities. The challenge is to make objects that serve different purposes work together as one organism augmenting each other.
Digitalisation provides a significant opportunity to improve the connection between the pieces of a puzzle and how they interact with each other.
Micro-mobility digitalisation, what stands behind?
We have put some my initial thoughts about micro-mobility digitalisation in the previous article, so let’s try to describe it in a different way.
Speaking about the digitalisation of something that already exists, usually, we refer to something hardware that was built, manufactured or handmade. We take the object of transformation and add two things — the hardware module and software.
In micro-mobility, the software part is usually a program or system of programs that play a role of a brain or intelligence. It’s a thinking centre that:
- Collecting the data from the device;
- Get third party sources data;
- Analyse gathered data does all needed calculations and decision making (with or without human help) regarding ongoing processes;
- Command the hardware modules to execute actions.
The hardware module is a physical system of sensors, controllers, levers embedded into the device. It allows:
- Gather the material parameters from the device, sort of speed, incline, video stream, etc. and deliver them to the software in a digital format;
- Enforce commands received from the software.
The software is usually stored in a device, cloud storage or web, and as a combination of several options. Depending on the depth of digital integration and complexity of the system, it also can use neural networks, computer vision and other new technical solutions for work.
Micro mobility ecosystem
The ecosystem is about the harmonical combination and coexistence of several objects. In micro-mobility, those elements are:
- Urban environment
- Specific functional equipment needed to maintain transport needs
- The transport devices
- Society, people around us
Urban environment
Let’s start from the largest and the most sophisticated part of the ecosystem. It is also the most complex in terms of change. Each city’s environment has long and short term urban planning.
Long term planning makes for the next 20–30 years, depends on city specifics and design approach. It is a strategic level of city development, and it takes into account:
- Social requests;
- Current challenges or disadvantages of a particular city;
- Technical capability. The innovations we have and need to work on to resolve problems in future;
- Resources;
- Available space.
Short term planning usually is 3–5 years upfront and has more tactical and more minor strategic character. It covers:
- Revision and prioritising the backlog of current long term plans;
- Break down the most prioritised parts and create a plan of its implementation;
- Fixing small local issues;
- Implementation of new technologies that have been appeared some time ago and can have a significant impact on city health.
One of the most outstanding examples of a sustainable developed city is Singapore. Engineers, designers and developers work together to resolve very complicated challenges. They approach long and short term planning to resolve issues that are not obvious right now but will be in the nearest future.
One of those problems is the transportation system. The minimal space of the islands pushes designers and engineers to find more courageous solutions. Apart from creating new artificial lands to extend the territory, they look up to the sky to explore air space.
The transport type they are investigating is drones. Engineers observe it as a transport for people shortly. Meanwhile, they use it for a local delivery system that allows middle-sized boxes with stuff around the city.
It is an excellent example of how a hardware unit, a drone, interacting with specially constructed environments (delivery stations, post offices, etc.), controlled by complex software, help to resolve transportation issues.
The beauty of drones, especially on the post-delivery scale, is you don’t need to change anything in the existing transportation ecosystem. Wheel transport is more challenging as it requires more involvement in the current transportation infrastructure.
Micro mobility transport has one disadvantage, compared to, let’s say, regular vehicles — it is relatively small in size. It affects the visibility of transportation units on the road it often causes clashes on the road. It is an important reason to think about the separation of small vehicles from other big sized transport.
Last 50 years urban design has been very concentrated to get as much space as possible for cars on the streets, so sidewalks become narrow, car lanes wider, and it does not resolve traffic issues.
Streets need to be adapted to provide all constructive changes new transport requires. We are interested mostly in areas like driving lines, parking spaces and charging spots.
A nice example of street space modernization is the design experiment in Riga, where designers distributed limited street space between vehicles/trams and bicycles, separating out their lines.
Micro mobility units have a separated out space in this environment that carries more safety. Additionally, it separates the car lane from a pedestrian zone.
Computer vision is another technology that allows us to improve the transportation ecosystem. The hardware module here is a camera, it captures live images from the streets, and sends them to the storage. The software part takes data from storage, analyses pictures, recognises separate elements, like cars, people and cyclists, then combines this information with information from other devices and shares it with drivers. Integration of this technology helps us track urban traffic, availability of parking places and changing spots. Based on information gathered and computed from street cameras and personal transport devices can optimize traffic distribution across the roads. Each driver will be directed to a less loaded street.
The critical element of a sustainable micro-mobility design is a collaboration of designers, architects and engineers. The expertise of each of these specialists resolve existing problems in a more complex way, mix the newest technologies and best in class approaches.
Specific functional equipment
In a previous section, we already mentioned computer vision technology. It needs cameras to track traffic and object positioning. This is one of the equipment types. Let’s list possible equipment we might need to install on the streets:
- Cameras — track traffic and free parking slots;
- Speed capture cameras — to detect dangerous objects that move at very high speeds and notify other drivers about them;
- Movement detection systems — to detect vehicle appearance in certain areas;
- Electric charging stations — charge electric transport units;
- Additional street lights — highlight specific elements of the street to make movement safe at night;
- Microphones — to check a level of noize on the streets;
- Specific equipment related to computation of captured information by other devices, sort of servers, etc.
All these examples are hardware devices we install on the streets that help us get information from the environment.
Transport devices
Transportation units are a very important part of the ecosystem. Electro vehicles can be equipped with sensors, cameras, global positioning systems and other modules that allow them to gather specific information about the vehicle itself and the environment around it.
The ability to scan and track the environment is critical in points where streets are not equipped with additional sensors or cameras.
Tracking a device’s health helps not only a driver to understand the state of the vehicle, but also other drivers to see the object that might need help or support.
The vehicle board system might be synchronized with several others to share specific parameters, create a statistic, analyze driver’s behaviour and improve it and enhance streets to fit that behaviour.
Gathered data is also important to train Artificial intelligence that controls autopilot devices. In analogy to drones, such devices can do a simple job like delivery. More advanced devices may be used as taxi cabs for transportation of people. I believe more and more devices with no drivers will appear in our cities and become a part of the micro-mobility ecosystem.
GPS built into autopilot devices can tell you where you can jump into a cab right here right now, and get to your destination point as fast as possible.
People
Me and you. Our role is as important as all other 3 parts of the ecosystem we described above.
We have our devices in our pockets. Installing only one application we can contribute a bunch of value to the system, and get even more back.
It does not mean we need to share our personal data, and each step will be tracked and recorded. Information we share should be absolutely confidential and not linked to our personality.
Tracking the position of our device we can share data with a system to understand where the crowd appeared, what time and in what quantity. The communicational aspect is an interesting one that we get as a side effect of gathered data. We can ask the system to notify us when some of our friends, who also would like to meet, are somewhere around the street or 100 meters around us.
Imagine we get back from work, we decide to walk a bit to relax and stretch bones after a long day sitting on the chair. Our app can help us to calculate a direction to walk on a street with fewer people and less noise, where there is no traffic.
Or you need to get back home as fast as you can, so pressing 1 button the autopilot can be booked and move toward or wait right in the corner.
So
This might sound weird, but all of these cold robotic technological systems shall, first of all, bring us more positive emotions, and make the routine more colourful and enjoyable, and secondly, make streets and transportation systems safer, cleaner and easier to use.