Tonight I will drive the roundtrip of Fårö to Visby to fetch Oscar who comes with the ferry from the mainland. The journey to Visby is 70 km and takes an hour including the short ferry ride between Fårö and Gotland.
Yesterday I got a email from another Fårö-dweller who asked if someone could pick up a son who was landing at the airport in the afternoon and was heading for Fårö. I responded so now I have filled up the car, but there is still yet another available seat.
One client was IBM's Peugeot - Citroen team who at that time (1999) was very much involved in the pioneering of Telematics. The teamleader, Bernard visioned in a lunch break.
I believe that in the future cars will become a service, because the only way to solve the traffic situations on the European roads is to automate traffic. And when you are no longer in charge of your car, owning it will be less of a freedom symbol. It will be much more practical if you can use a car that makes sense at each moment.
Let's say you are going on vacation with the family. Then you need a big car. But when you travel to work, then you would share a smaller car with others, or use public transportation.
It is impossible to build roads to accomodate the growing number of cars with the current idea of each person owning his/her own car.Some people say that development is happening fast today. I tend to think that sometimes it is remarkably slow. After all this is 12 years ago. But now things start to happen. In the book "The Mesh" (and on TED) by Lisa Gansky talks about how the future is in sharing. A privately owned car is used in average 9% of the time. The rest of the time it is just consuming space and money. The car is perceived as a means to freedom. But for more and more people now, NOT having a car makes them feel free.
Here on the islands of Gotland and Fårö the concept of Mesh could revolutionize public transportation. All it would take is the information about "who drives where" in their own car, combining it with "who wants to go where" and a secure way to transfer money between those who provide a space in their cars and those who gets a ride.
In the debate about sustainability and around the question if growth is desirable this is an interesting opportunity. If sharing cars could increase the average use of a car from 9% to 50%, what would be the consequences?
Sharing cars is just one aspect on the Mesh. How about if we started to share the future?
4 comments:
It's an interesting idea.
I'm thinking that a virtual booking system would do for it, and then by the end of the month you'd get your collected bill.
In Romania they are doing this without the kind of certainty that we Swedes require. They are sharing cars and share the cost - by hitchhiking. It's a well spread and a well known concept there.
Well, an ideal would be to revive ye old tradition of hitchiking, but I thought that only people born before 1960 had any experience from that. (Except then of course Robin & Amanda)
Anyway, a mesh ride sharing system would be a good way to save money for commuters who prefer to own a car, and a practical public transport for others. Why not use the same price as the local bus. An innovative Region could even back such a system up. That you buy a bus ticket that could also be used for ride-sharing.
No, I'm thinking something much more independent and simpler. I've made a sketch and written a small paper about how this system should work.
The bus is expensive, unfair and sometimes - too cheap. We need something well calculated and fair that creates an equal win-win.
Prototyping should happen asap. I'm thinking this as a 24 hours business prototype. For this, I need two app developers, a designer, someone with a passion for algorithms and a great copy writer.
Aha. A great Glocal Gotland project. I have been thinking around this for a while, as a sharing concept could be very generic and fit other purposes as well. Or we could aim at designing a "Sharing core" that could be packaged for different purposes.
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