Shared Vehicle System — A Sustainable Solution for Traffic Congestion
My name is Biniyam Paulos. I’m an urban sustainability entrepreneur and current a year one student at African Leadership University in Mauritius. Originally, I’m an Ethiopian, born and raised in a small town called Hosanna which is found in the southern part of the country. Until I graduate from high school, my passion was to become an astronomical engineer and be the first one to design and launch the first ever communication satellite of Ethiopia and help save billions of dollars payed by the government for satellite rent. But, after I realized that there is no Astronomical engineering department in all the universities of Ethiopia, I shifted my focus a little bit and moved on to study Mechanical engineering, which I believed would also be an alternative way of reaching my goal. Soon after I started my bachelor in Mechanical engineering at Addis Ababa Institute of Technology, the best technology institute in the country, I got invited to join African Leadership University on mid of September 2016, which marked as the beginning of a new adventure in my life.
ALU is an institution which aspires to create future African leaders who are believed to transform the continent in to a whole new level in the coming few decades by equipping its students with innovation, human centered design(HCD) skill and problem solving mindset as weapons to transform grand grand challenges in to life changing opportunities. The concept of HCD has opened a whole new perspective for me. It changed the way I look into things and made me realize that lack of communication satellite is not the only problem my country is having right now. There are even bigger and more urgent issues, challenges of not only Ethiopia, but of the world at large. One of which, as I have figured out from my observation and research, is the transportation issue.According to the UN goal, it is categorized under SDG11 and calls for urgent solutions since it is getting more and more worse from day to day as the people are buying more cars. By bringing innovation and HCD together, I have developed a solution for the traffic congestion issue in the urban areas of today’s world, which I believe might help relieve the traffic jam on the streets of several cities meanwhile reducing the emission of pollutant gases.
Traffic is one of the major pressing issues of today’s world. The number of vehicles are increasing at an alarming rate from day to day way faster than ever and of course, so is the emission of pollutant gases. According to a research done by World Health Organization in 2015, it has been stated that vehicles contribute to 27% of the total pollutant gas emission and as the number of vehicles increase, this amount will get higher and higher resulting in severe climatic changes and worsening the existing traffic jam in almost all urban areas of the developed and developing countries. My project focuses on how innovatively designed shared vehicle system might help relieve the issue of traffic congestion in today’s urban areas and on the other hand reduce the amount of pollutant gas emission. The idea is about exhaustively utilizing recent technologies in combination with HCD to effectively implement an advanced bus system especially designed for private car owners and encourage them to use the service by providing them with incentives for leaving their cars.
As an urban sustainability entrepreneur, I am passionate about solving the issue of urban mobility and help create a more convenient means of transportation in the urban areas of the world meanwhile significantly reducing the emission of poisonous gases from vehicles.The lower the emission, the lesser is the climatic change and the more sustainable the environment becomes making the planet we live in more resilient and prosperous.
After a few days, I will be participating in a global innovation lab in Copenhagen organized to develop solutions for the sustainable development goals and I am excited for being chosen to represent Ethiopia and the only one from the whole country. From UNLEASH 2017 Innovation Lab, I look forward to: sharing my insights with fellow talents and hear from them as well; filling any gap in my solution or improving it using the feedback and insights I get from experts and entrepreneurs; finding out if it is possible to combine my solution with others for better and larger impact; meeting new people from different background and having fun with fellow talents from all over the world.
Thank you!
