DANGERS LURK IN THE DARK
Turning clocks back may be hazardous
Traffic is so congested in Mexico City that the average speed on its roads is barely 11 kilometres an hour. That’s essentially the same as it was in 1910, when horsedrawn carriages were the city’s primary form of urban transport.
In Sao Paulo, Brazil, traffic jams regularly clog up to 375 km of its urban thoroughfares at a cost of $10.8 billion US per year, which is a whopping 5.7 per cent of the metropolitan GDP of South America’s largest — and Brazil’s wealthiest — city.
Vancouver, meanwhile, is North America’s third-most congested city, motorists regularly spending 66 per cent more time in their cars during the evening rush hour than they would if traffic were free flowing.
Free parking: That’s the solution to traffic congestion. Or, at the very least, an incentive to get motorists to drive smarter. So says Nicolas Burger, TomTom’s automotive marketing director. He was speaking in a far-ranging webinar with Automotive World that focused not only on the enormous pollution problem that traffic jams cause but also the psychology of what is effective in getting people to drive more responsibly.
Parking, in and of itself, isn’t going to make traffic in Vancouver (Canada’s most congested city in TomTom rankings, with an overall congestion factor of 35 per cent) or Toronto (only slightly better, at 31 per cent) any more free-flowing, but the offer of free parking and other incentives, if efficiently controlled, just might.
Negative reinforcement measures — the tax on internal combustion cars travelling to downtown London, for instance, or allowing only odd-or evennumber licence plate numbers to enter metro Sao Paulo on alternating days — are simply not working. London’s downtown traffic is already back to pre-congestion-charge days and, according to Burger, since many Brazilians have two cars, circumventing Sao Paulo’s restriction is as simple as taking the Volkswagen with the odd-numbered plate to work instead of the Ford with the even-numbered plate.
Punishing people, it seems, is not a very effective way to get them to drive more eco-consciously. Much better is to provide drivers with an incentive, a reward for driving in a more environmentally friendly manner. And not just some narrow benefits focused on a small group of commuters, for example, the cashback schemes promoting electric vehicles that have largely benefited the rich buying Teslas. Nope, what Burger proposes is a completely interactive infrastructure, flexible and wide-ranging enough to engage everyday drivers of all forms of automobiles.
It’s all part of the natural evolution of the Smart City. Smart City 1.0, says Burger, was all about the collection of big data, dissected, analyzed and then used to make large-scale changes to traffic management, such as reallocating lanes to better handle daily traffic patterns (on the Lion’s Gate bridge in Vancouver, for instance, or Jarvis Street in Toronto) and timing traffic lights to better organize traffic flow. It was a grandiose scheme let down by the simple fact most Canadian cities lack the “smart” traffic lights and other infrastructures to take advantage of all the data.
Smart City 2.0, however, will use hybrid navigation — a combination of traditional routing information with mobility services, including carpooling information and online parking reservations — fed, not to a creaking infrastructure, but the new breed of connected cars the automotive industry has been promising us. Indeed, the cornerstone of Smart City 2.0 is the connection between car and infrastructure and, thanks to the plethora of information now at your fingertips, how much more efficient and emissions-reducing your morning commute can be.
Here’s how Burger sees it working: First, you will fill out a driving profile to determine which alternative transportation systems — ride sharing, carpooling, subways, buses, bicycle sharing and even walking — you would be willing to use.
In fact, says TomTom, the key to future commuting is “multimodal mobility.” So instead of commuting from Burnaby to Burrard Street or Oshawa to Bay Street solely by car, multimodal mobility might, depending on what alternatives you select in your driving profile, direct you to drive a portion of your route in your car, then hop on a bus or even a bicycle to complete the final portion of your commute more efficiently.
Of course, the system will be geared to the particular peculiarities of each urban commute. Walking is a viable alternative in New York City while in Vancouver, cycling might make more sense. Indeed, Burger even sees a future where your daily commute might involve multiple changeover points, your morning drive made more rapid by a transit ride and a short hop on a bicycle, all meticulously timed for maximum efficiency.
The crux of Smart City 2.0’s ability to reduce commute times is programming the entire commute for maximum efficiency. Not only would the system tell you, based on each day’s specific traffic pattern, exactly what time you have to leave to get to the office on time, it would also provide all the information and timing you need for a quick turnaround at switchover points. In other words, no arriving at your Park-and-Ride area only to find you missed your bus by two minutes.
And the free parking I mentioned? Well, besides providing you with more efficient commuting options, TomTom will allow you to reserve a parking spot before you leave home. More importantly, it will allow municipalities to judge the environmental friendliness of your choices and reward you appropriately. One of the most appropriate perks, should your commute be sufficiently green, would be a free parking spot at the end of your commute.
Minimizing all our stopping and going would put more money back in the pockets of commuters by cutting fuel consumption by as much as 20 per cent. More importantly, optimized traffic management could reduce nitrogen oxide emissions — especially in those countries with a heavy diesel bias — by almost 50 per cent and carbon dioxide by 30 per cent. And it begins by giving people the right incentive.