An inspiring meeting at Google
Agenda: The Future of Mass Transit
“The roller coaster,”
said the intern, a moment after Larry Page had asked him, What did you discover are the most efficient forms of public transit?
I heard this exchange in one of the more unusual meetings I attended during my tenure at Google. Back in 2009, I found myself at the office in Mountain View participating a weekend unconference, with a large group of other Google engineers, product managers, and designers. I had joined a session called, “The Future of Mass Transit.”
I saw that it might be interesting as soon as I walked into the room because in addition to Larry, Sebastian Thrun was also there. I’d never met him, but I knew his work. Thrun led some projects on Google Maps, and was working on the still ultra-secret self-driving car project.
The most efficient way to move people around
A Maps engineering summer intern was standing in front of the room, presenting the results of his project. He had worked on figuring out a way to rank forms of human transit by efficiency.
He used several ranking methods, and the roller coaster was at or near the top of every list, however it was ranked.
This made a strong impression on me. I loved working for a company where someone was tackling wildly ambitious problems like fixing transportation in cities. I appreciated how he was framing the problem so broadly and creatively.
In addition to roller coasters, he had ranked airplanes and even rockets in his search for insights on how to move people around in new and better ways.
“The ski lift is next-most efficient”
Also near the top of all the intern’s lists was the ski lift. The modern ones, that disconnect the chairs from the fast-moving cable to load and unload skiers at a comfortable speed. Once loaded, it whisks them to the top of the mountain before hypothermia has a chance to set in.
He pointed out that the ski lift model has advantages over the roller coaster: like minimal g-force and less overall terror. Qualities people usually value in a commuter vehicle.
Car is still king
However, when the intern weighted the Freedom to choose destination, criteria heavily enough, the automobile came out on top. Cars have unbeatable advantages in addition to comfort and general lack of terror. Sebastian Thrun highlighted convenience, and privacy as a way to focus the discussion following the intern’s presentation.
How might we…
We spent the rest of the hour session working on, How might we combine ski-lift efficiency with automobile convenience?
The answer: the Ski-lift car
The group decided that a feasible design would be based on a lightweight, electric car you could park in your suburban garage and use to drive to the outskirts of the city where you worked. Then you would drive the car into a station, analogous to a ski lift boarding area, and join a short line of similar vehicles. At the front of the line, a hook on the car’s roof would deploy and hook onto a cable like a gondola at a ski resort. You and your car would then soar a hundred feet or so in the air across the city to your destination.
If it worked, this approach would radically reduce congestion on surface roads, and would make commuting much more efficient. All this while maintaining what’s great about cars.
Which we might see soon
There are concepts on the drawing boards for this kind of system, some even look like they’re ready for roll-out.
Still, imagine how quick and thrilling a roller coaster commute would be? I hope some city somewhere tries it.
