Gentle Congestion
I talked to Mitchell Joachim in the new issue of Wired. As befitting someone who worked on the “City Car” at MIT, some of the talk turned to wheels, which like everything else in Joachim’s vision would look radically different down the road:
“His various cars would be less machine than Facebook on wheels. Instead of rpm gauges, there’d be social networking software telling drivers where their friends are and how to get there. Made from neoprene and other soft materials, cars would no longer suffer traffic-fouling fender benders, merely what he calls “gentle congestion”–picture a flock of urban sheep grazing against one other. Like Zipcar vehicles, the cars would be shared. They would “read” potholes and send warnings to nearby drivers and city repair crews. Urban parking would be eased by intelligent real-time supply and demand management, with people bidding remotely for available spots. Of course, there’d also be more spaces to begin with, since his cars could be folded and stacked like shopping carts. The average New York City block could handle 880 of the vehicles, he says.”
There was a lot more interesting stuff I couldn’t squeeze in, like ConEd thinking about getting into the mobility business — “cars as batteries,” etc.
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This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under Cars, Cities, Congestion, Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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