In China, ‘battery-bikes’ are outselling cars by four-to-one. Pedelec sales are soaring in Europe, too. Is this the start of system-wide phase-shift in transportation?
At a workshop in Delhi last year, during the UnBox Festival, I posed the following question to a group of 20 design, transport, and city development professionals: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and villages?
The answer was: a lot – and it’s not just about the bikes. We discussed the need for an online catalogue of products and business models to aid decision-support. We learned that micro-finance for independent vendors should be a priority. Traffic architectures, hygiene regulations, and disinterest of municipal authorities, were an obstacle. Opposition from place-based retailers was an issue. Topography, and climate, could not be ignored. As the to-do list grew, the scale of the challenge seemed ever more daunting.
But a strange this has happened. The obstacles we identified in Delhi seem less daunting today than a year ago. Something big is afoot. E-bikes in China are outselling cars four to one. Their sudden popularity has confounded planners who thought China was set to become the next automobile powerhouse. In Europe, too, e-bike sales are escalating. Sales have been growing by 50% a year since 2008 with forecasts of at least three million sales in 2015.
I have the strong impression that a cloud of discrete but related developments is converging. Read More
Energy: Thriving On Five Percent?
In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion.
The modern city has been shaped by the availability of cheap oil and resources, and plentiful credit. Massive resource and energy flows have been used to build skyscrapers, heat and cool buildings, move and treat water, feed people, and move them and their goods around.
This expansion of cities involved the stupendous use of energy. Tom Murphy, a physics professor, calculates that U.S. energy use since 1650, including wood, biomass, fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, etc, has grown at a steady 2.9 percent. Those 360 years of more-or-less steady growth help explain Read More »