VANCOUVER VISIONARY
Local woman presents at TED Talks
On Thursday night in New York, a Vancouverite shared her winning vision of an autonomous, electric and car-sharing future.
Sandra Phillips took the stage at TED Talks after winning the Next Visionaries contest in September in Frankfurt, Germany. One of six finalists in the BMWi and TED-sponsored competition, the Swiss-born Phillips impressed the jury with her vision of car sharing, which pays particular attention to social and extra-urban factors.
“Like all the other finalists, Sandra Phillips has thought outside the box,” said Hildegard Wortmann, a BMW senior vicepresident and member of the Next Visionaries jury. “Her concept is already quite advanced and also considers the aspect of social change.”
Phillips was among the 180 entrants of the inaugural Next Visionaries competition that saw a call for submissions in the areas of technology, the environment and human interaction.
Her vision includes a carsharing infrastructure that could complement local public transport in places lacking safe, reliable and universally affordable mobility. In addition, autonomous rental cars could ensure a reasonably priced and secure mobility option for women and children, in particular.
“It’s an amazing, but also nerve-racking, honour,” Phillips admitted earlier this week in a Kitsilano cafe before heading to New York City.
“The contest topic was really all about technology, but my idea focused around the use of technology in the communities we live in. And that’s something the TED Talks often concentrate on.”
Phillips has been in Vancouver, on and off, since 2001, but moved here permanently in 2008.
Two years later she began work with Daimler to introduce the company’s nascent Car2Go network to the Canadian market.
“Originally I was hired to lead a pilot project to see if it was feasible and made sense, then I was hired to launch the full service in Vancouver and other Canadian cities.”
In 2014, Phillips founded movmi, an organization that helps others to launch car-sharing services.
She worked with BCAA for nine months helping that organization get EVO up and running, and helped introduce Dubai’s first car-sharing startup. And last year she and her team worked with companies in Seattle, Portland and Brooklyn to help establish car-sharing entities. Clearly she has the carsharing chops, but where did her idea of integrating autonomous and electric minibuses into a car-sharing/public transit model come from.
“All the car shares that I’ve worked on focused on cities that are at least as big as Portland, but this idea has the true potential to bring (car-sharing) outside of large cities,” she explained.
“I can see this idea working in places like Costa Rica, or in a city like Halifax, which currently has its own station-based car-share but nothing else.
“If you can do this, all of a sudden you have a much more powerful eco-system that can get people anywhere when they need to get there.”
Further, Phillips sees the potential of establishing such an “eco-system” outside of the Western world, say in African countries that would benefit from safe and efficient ways to get around.
So what is the appeal of her vision of combining aspects of public transportation with car sharing?
“First of all, you don’t need as many personally owned vehicles sitting around in parking lots, so all of a sudden you have a lot more livable space that can be used for parks or playgrounds.
“And on a very individual level, there is money to be saved. Instead of spending half a million dollars over your lifetime (on vehicle ownership), you spend half that, that’s a lot of savings that you can use for something else.”
As to why her vision won the contest, Phillips thinks the community aspect of her idea appealed to the jury.
“Technology for technology’s sake is fun, but technology that really solves a problem actually makes a difference.”
Now that’s she’s convinced others of the appeal of her vision, what does she see as the biggest hurdle to make it a reality?
“In terms of the autonomous minibuses, what we need is room for pilot projects to show that a proof-of-concept works,” she said.
Then there’s the bigger issue of the collaboration between the public and private sectors.
“Historically, the public transit operators and the car-share companies have regarded each other as competition. I think that’s the biggest hurdle.
“But if we could combine the two, we would create this super public transit system. It’s a new way of thinking about something that traditionally has been offered by car manufacturers.”
What does she hope the New York audience took away from Thursday night’s presentation?
“Very simple. The shorter version is I’m trying to tell them that you can get around without owning a personal vehicle,” Phillips said.
“The bigger picture is I believe we have an opportunity to create something that would benefit our communities, particularly smaller ones in the long term.
“If we can start solving this today, we will create better and more livable cities in the future.”