The chaos at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is an excellent example of what happens when the logic of finance interacts with the logic of large complex systems. As Will Hutton wrote at the weekend, shareholders in British Airways (its sole tenant) and BAA (which runs the airport) demand perpetually growing dividends. [continue …]
The concept of sustainable tourism was invented 45 years ago – but it was added to global mass tourism, it did not replace it. Since then, although sustainable tourism brands have proliferated, mass tourism has continued to devastate its ‘destinations’ with growing intensity. So: what to do?
Most of the component parts for ultra-light mobility ecosystems are on the table - from cargo bikes, to sharing platforms. But how to make them work together as a city-compatible system? My advice to city managers: First, visit India and marvel at the richness of bike-based commerce. Second, go to Indonesia and marvel at the range of services available on the Go-Jek platform. Next - well, read on
Peak Car | Cloud Commuting | Gram Junkies | Green Tourism | Caloryville: The Two Wheeled City | From Bike Chain to Blockchain | From Autobahn to Bioregion | A Tale of Two Trains | From My Car to Scalar | Is an environmentally neutral car possible?
Two hundred people per second now climb onto a dockless bike somewhere in China. The bigger story? We may have reached a peak-car tipping point - a moment of system transformation - that's been slowly 'brewing' for a very long time. (This text follows my keynote at Seoul Smart Mobility International Conference).
Should transport systems be designed to save time – or calories? Who should own mobility sharing platforms: private companies? cities? us? What kind of ecosystem is needed to support the sharing platforms we want? These three questions are the focus of a workshop in London on 25 November. I’ve asked a three friends [continue …]
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem
The signs on the small van describe the services it supports: Taxi; Pick-up; Delivery; Assistance; Vendor; Security; Rental.
Seven [continue …]
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 [continue …]
My hosts last week at the Asia Pacific Design Library in Brisbane (which, on reflection, is probably the finest new library I have been in) asked me a few questions before our xskool:
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
A: When I’m on the road, which [continue …]
In 1996, Ivan Illich (above) agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam on the theme of ‘speed’. [continue …]
Reflecting on the ways that swallows move about the earth reminded me of the time, in 1996, when Ivan Illich agreed [continue …]
Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries, but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in [continue …]
(Illustration: Sameer Kulavoor Ghoda Bicycle Project)
At a workshop in Delhi a few weeks back, during the [continue …]
[The chart above is from the online catalogue of cargo bikes at Nutzrad]
India’s many millions of bicycle and rickshaw vendors embody the entrepreneurship, sustainable mobility, social innovation, and thriving local economies, that a sustainable city needs.
As an [continue …]
I’ve seen this Virtual Boarding Agent a couple of times now at Orly Airport in Paris. A It’s a life-sized, life-like, two dimensional human figure that talks pleasantly about liquids and gels. It’s spooky, clever, and very well executed – [continue …]
Two images have preoccupied me in recent days.
The first one [below] was taken in a lounge at Paris airport. I remember being struck by the intense design effort that had been made to create a controlled and insulated environment. On the tv screen were images of the popular revolt [continue …]
A study by Transportation Alternatives found that up to 45 percent of traffic in an area of Brooklyn was caused by cars circling the streets looking for parking. And in 2006, UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup calculated that, within a year, vehicles [continue …]
The future of the car has been electric for what? Five years now? ten? The answer is 110 years, for it was back in 1899 that La Jamais Contente (“The Never Satisfied”) became the first vehicle to go over [continue …]
Three years ago German photographer Thomas Kalak published a book called Thailand – Same same, but different!.
Featuring all manner of bamboo scaffolding, knotted aerial lines, hand painted signs, or converted plastic bags, the book celebrated the Thais’ exceptionally gifted art of improvisation.
The strange objects and [continue …]
Oslo Airport’s mean-looking bullet train reaches the city centre in nineteen minutes. At 210 kph [130 mph] it is not the world’s fastest – some of China’a new trains will soon reach nearly twice that speed – but Norway’s is surely the most macho to look at.
[continue …]
(Summer re-run: first published 31 March 2008)
The chaos at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is an excellent example of what happens when the logic of finance interacts with the logic of large complex systems.
As Will Hutton wrote at the weekend, shareholders in British Airways (its sole tenant) and BAA (which [continue …]
If Katla (above: she’s Eyjafjallajökull’s much bigger sister) blows, and grounds flights forever, will this finally be Dr Storkey’s moment?
The blogwaves are already filled with links to Seat 61. But as I’ve Cassandra’d here repeatedly (yes, [continue …]
While I’m away, would you help me promote these new editions of my book? In The Bubble has now been translated into French, Italian and Portuguese – and I’d appreciate your support in three ways:
a) buy-and-send copies for all your French, Italian and Portuguese-speaking friends around the world;
b) tell everyone [continue …]
Naomi Klein writes in today’s Guardian that “hope alone won’t save the world. It’s time to hope less, and demand more”.
I’m not sure. I find Klein’s piece enervating. Will demanding things from mainstream politicians like Obama be more productive than waiting hopefully for them to save [continue …]
They’ve installed this impressive new departures board at Paris CDG airport. It lists a good number of the more than one thousand departures from there each day. Now, what it needs next is a right hand column that shows, for every flight, the [continue …]
Many of us are confronted by a painful dilemma: the only way to reduce our ecological footprint of flying is to stop flying – and yet we feel we need to travel for our work, and to see loved ones. Can modern transport and tourism ever be sustainable? After all, [continue …]
Climate change, peak debt, peak energy: these are all stakes being driven into the body of business as usual.
The days of acting as if infinite growth were possible within a finite system are over.
Where does this leave (interaction) design?
To find out you need to attend my talk on “Experiencing Sustainability” [continue …]
A key principle of City Eco Lab was to focus on live projects and enterprises rather than on good ideas in abstract.
The city’s dynamic new courier company, Les Coursiers Verts (The Green Courier Company), took us at our word and relocated their office to [continue …]
A personal treat for me at City Eco Lab was the VeloWala installation that’s being put together for us specially by Quicksand and friends in India.
Across the hall the Velowala presentation about bicycle-enabled commerce in India was as fabulous as I knew it [continue …]
A terrific new word arrives just in time for the weekend: “phugoid”.
I learned about phugoids from an airline pilot called Paul in his reply to John Michael Greer’s piece on “the effluent society”.
“As a pilot (writes Paul) I like to use [continue …]
California’s strategy for sustainable mobility is to run sixteen lane traffic jams on ethanol. In Sweden, Volvo have launched this hybrid-drive trash truck which I saw in Goteborg yesterday. It’s silent at low speeds when it’s collecting bins: the all-electric drive is for moving off [continue …]
My mates at Adobe found some great pix (including this one) to accompany my piece on travel and its substitutes
The chaos at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is an excellent example of what happens when the logic of finance interacts with the logic of large complex systems. As Will Hutton wrote at the weekend, shareholders in British Airways (its sole tenant) and BAA (which runs the airport) demand perpetually growing dividends. [continue …]
This is my talk from yesterday in Helsinki at Pixelache University. There are pix here
Could the biosphere be saved by six glass lamps, six speakers, 36 ultra bright leds, six diy mono amplifiers, a diy arduino-based six channel led [continue …]
I’m running ths story again because the > Pixelache Uni final programme has just been publshed.
* * *
OK, so you know and I know that air travel is simply not sustainable. But we do it anyway because we are hypocrites (I took 78 flights last year) [continue …]
A gem from CryptoGram.“Surprising nobody, a new study concludes that airport security isn’t helping: A team at the Harvard School of Public Health could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks. They also found no evidence to suggest that [continue …]
Can transport and tourism ever be sustainable? The movement of people and goods around the world consumes vast amounts of matter, energy, space, and time – most of it non-renewable. Could transport intensity be de-coupled from economic progress – and if so, how?
This event in October’s series of Dott [continue …]
I was asked by Seung Yoon Lee, at Korean Design Research Institute, for a three line quote on “a new concept of mobility due to ubiquitous technologies”. (It’s for an upcoming issue of Asian Design Journal).
So I sent this: “Reducing the movement of matter – whether goods, or people – [continue …]
The next Dott 07 (Designs of the time) Explorers Club meeting on Thursday 14 July, to be held at the Robert Stephenson Centre in Newcastle. Our focus this month is Sustainable Tourism.
In terms of someone’s carbon footprint, a single holiday in New Zealand is equivalent [continue …]
News reaches me from Los Angeles, via Bruce Sterling that, in the corporate imagination of General Motors, “the Hummer could be transformed from the SUV that environmentalists love to hate to an algae-infused, oxygen-exuding buggy that would open up like a flower.” (GM’s sketch for the [continue …]
I chose a bad place to read George Monbiot’s new book Heat – the transit lounge of Bangkok’s new Suvarnabhumi Airport.
I already knew that flying is an indefensible way to travel because of its contribution to global warming. But I’ve comforted myself over the years with the [continue …]
When Paul Barter posted a link to a video of a chaotic looking Indian intersection, back in April, it provoked debate on the merits of traffic discipline versus chaos. A discussion ensued on issues about shared space or “naked streets” approaches to streets and the public realm. The video [continue …]
How was the traffic on your vacation drive home this year? Any near misses? Twenty thousand citizens are killed in traffic accidents in Europe each year, so you probably saw more than one car crash or its aftermath.
For the European Commission, these deaths are a price we must pay for [continue …]
This has my vote for most sublime mobility project of the year.
A team of Karachi vehicle decorators has transformed a Melbourne tram to bring the experience of a journey on a W-11 Karachi mini-bus to the streets of Melbourne. Vibrant dancing colour in hand-cut [continue …]
Transhumanists believe in efforts by human beings to “reshape their inherited physical, cognitive and emotional identities by extending lifespan and enhancing human capacities”. I admit to a prejudice that transhumanists share this enthusiasm because they are all bald, bearded, and barking. But not all transhumanists are death-fearing loony-tunes [continue …]
The subject of car-free mobility sounds necessary but unappealing. But news reaches me of a sublime-sounding event called The Walking Project. It’s an exploration, on foot, of desire lines – the paths made by people who walk across fields in South Africa – and across vacant [continue …]
To a car company, replacing the chrome wing mirror on an SUV with a carbon fibre one is a step towards sustainable transportation. To a radical ecologist, all motorised movement is unsustainable. So when is transportation sustainable, and when is it not?
Eric Britton, an expert on the subject, had the [continue …]
If mobility is a new place, then this event is the place to be.
Capturing the Moving Mind is a conference on board the Trans-Siberian train. It’s about new forms of movement and control, war and economy, in the current situation. An opening discussion of the blurring borderlines between art, [continue …]
Outside Baghdad, and almost everywhere one might travel in the world, the risk of being killed in a road accident greatly exceeds the risk of being killed by a terrorist.
John Adams – Britain’s leading academic expert on risk, and author of a seminal book by that title – wrote a [continue …]
As a system, mobility is locked into a mode of perpetual growth in a world whose carrying capacity is limited. The status quo policy of ‘predict and provide’ promises more travel (of people and goods), forever, but using new technologies and integrated systems to make mobility more efficient.
A second design [continue …]
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