Smartphones are transforming transit in cities all over the world, and city governments are struggling to figure out how to best manage the change. If the world was looking to New York City’s recently enacted legislation affecting for-hire vehicle companies, then there will be disappointment given that, once again, the city’s political establishment decided to impose an outdated regulatory regime on innovative firms, making life harder for thousands of new taxi drivers while raising the price of rides for millions of New Yorkers and visitors to the city. The law, enacted this summer, caps the number of e-hail licenses in the city for a year and also enables the city to impose regulations on the type of compensation structures offered to drivers.

Who benefits? Politicians argue that it’s existing drivers who received their taxi registration before the one-year moratorium on new licenses was implemented, but if you think they’re the primary beneficiary then there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

In reality, politicians got behind this legislation because they want to send a message to Silicon Valley, the startup community and their financiers: If you want access to the 8-plus million person New York City market, you’ll have to go through the local political class first, and that will cost you: in form of taxes, campaign contributions, lobbyists, and more.

True to form, the left and right have staked out their normal positions on this issue. For the left, it’s all about protecting the wages and rights of the less-than-10,000 existing drivers, even if that means higher costs for all New Yorkers and more obstacles for people who want to earn money by driving a car. For the right, it’s about protecting businesses and drivers from regulatory controls that will raise prices for consumers, even if that means facilitating the big business takeover of an industry that has been a source of wealth for independent individuals and small businesses in New York City for a century.

Like many issues involving new technology, we need to look beyond the left-wing or right-wing way to manage these technologies, and instead look to the “open source way.”

What do we want? Safe, convenient rides, with low prices for riders, high income for drivers, positive impacts on traffic, and data protection for everyone involved.

The best way to achieve these ends isn’t complex licensure regimes, quotas on new taxis, or putting more surveillance technologies in our cars or on our streets. Instead, New York City should do for its local cab industry the same thing successful industries do for themselves: standardize how information is formatted and exchanged between systems. This makes it possible for information from one app, like Uber, to be read, understood and interacted with by another app, like Lyft or Google Maps.

Making ride-hailing data more standardized and interoperable will have a number of benefits.

First, it aggregates supply and demand, which increases competition in the taxi market leading to lower prices for riders and more business for drivers.

Second, it gives riders and drivers more options, allowing them to use an app with the mission of benefiting New Yorkers instead of benefiting investors in giant tech corporations.

Third, it mitigates a threat many people fear: that Uber, Lyft, and other venture-backed ride-sharing apps are subsidizing their own cab rides to undermine the legacy taxi industry, and then once the legacy industry is dead, they’ll jack up prices. That strategy won’t work if New York City is committed to maintaining a system of its own.

The idea of establishing a “ride sharing” (or “e-hail”) standard isn’t new. It has been discussed and proposed by a number of people in New York City’s tech community for years, including Ben Kallos, a tech-aware City Council member who proposed it in a 2014 bill, and by Chris Whong, now the lead developer of NYC Planning Labs, who proposed it in a 2013 blog post.

Critics of this approach have claimed that the city doesn’t have the capacity to develop its own e-hailing systems, but that simply isn’t true. Generic apps similar to Lyft and Uber exist in hundreds of markets around the world. Even local cab companies in New York City have developed their own apps.

Creating an e-hailing system for New York City would likely involve a three-step process: (a) develop a “ride sharing data standards” body that would bring riders, drivers, city agencies, and app developers together to create specifications for how all taxi-hailing information should be formatted and exchanged; (b) develop and operate a basic, open source e-hail smartphone application that would use these data standards to, like any one of the dozens of ride-hailing apps available around the world, allow New Yorkers to request rides and drivers to fulfill those requests; and (c) create a city-administered server that not only processes information from the current city taxi app but also allows other ride-sharing apps to exchange their information with the server.

This approach would give Uber, Lyft, and other popular apps a choice: they can plug in to the city’s e-hail exchange server and share their rider and driver information with other apps – or go it alone and face the consequences of having less access to rider and driver information than their competitors.

This approach leverages the city’s considerable influence to produce a number of benefits:

By following established best practices from government digital service organizations and open source communities, this system could be produced quickly and inexpensively. And by open-sourcing an app and inviting other cities to use and modify the New York City code, we could join a small but growing community of cities around the world developing and sharing open source software (such as Madrid’s Consul project) that enables them to provide government services faster, better, cheaper, and in a more ethical manner.

The original meaning of “regulation” wasn’t the levying of taxes and fees to penalize innovation — it was to “make regular” through the implementation of transparent business practices and the adoption of standard operating procedures. That is precisely what New York City should be doing, and it can do so by modelling best practice behavior that challenges Silicon Valley (and its New York-based counterparts) to produce better products, for lower prices, in more responsible ways, with more respect for the rights of their users.

Any municipality can throw rocks at Silicon Valley by imposing taxes and creating obstacles to market entry, but few have the capacity and scale to challenge Silicon Valley by creating innovative products. New York City has that ability. Let’s use it.

***
Devin Balkind is a technologist and nonprofit executive who works on civic technology projects in New York City. On Twitter @DevinBalkind.

Photo by BeyondDC

The post New York City Shouldn’t Regulate Ride-Hailing Apps – It Should Compete With Them appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This opinion piece by Boyd Cohen explores how a new blockchain layer for mobility could allow shared mobility startups to quickly launch their services and have immediate access to a network effect. Cohen is the co-founder of IoMob, which combines open source and blockchain technology to decentralize mobility, and the dean of research at the EADA Business School in Barcelona.

Boyd Cohen: Shareable readers are well aware of the overlapping interests between the blossoming sharing economy and the need to support the urban commons and Sharing Cities.

Luckily for us urban dwellers, a growing array of sharing economy projects have emerged to help, at least in some cases, reduce our resource consumption, and shift to circular and shared access models. Perhaps no part of the urban landscape has been more embraced by sharing economy entrepreneurs than mobility. And with good reason. Our cities have become all too congested and contaminated by the 70 percent of vehicles commuting as the single occupied variety. Our cities’ physical infrastructures and investments have been spent on enabling personal vehicles to travel, park, and refuel (with fossil fuels for the most part), instead of allocating such precious resources to other and better uses.

The shared mobility space is huge. We have witnessed in recent years all kinds of business models for shared mobility such as bikesharing (municipal or P2P), carsharing, carpooling, parking space sharing, shared access to EV charging stations, and more. In fact, in Barcelona alone, according to Sharemrkt there are more than 50 such shared mobility operators in the city.

The question we ask ourselves at IoMob however, is how can this growing number of shared mobility startups compete with the entrenched larger and multinational mobility companies (Uber, Cabify) and even the more benign, larger peers like Zipcar or municipally run bike-sharing schemes? The current shared mobility marketplace requires that each startup build their own underlying tech for handling payments, user registration, reputation management and the like, while also spending their scarce resources to build their brand and user base. It is an uphill battle for sure.

Blockchain technology offers a powerful alternative to this scenario by engaging a range of mobility stakeholders and an open-source set of technologies for startups. Larger companies and public transit operators — any shared mobility service operator, really — once validated as complying with local laws, could be made visible to any user who uses apps that are connected to the protocol. Instead of requiring each mobility provider to launch their own apps, the Internet of Mobility (IoM) allows for an open ecosystem of operators to share access to infrastructure and user bases. You may ask, for example, why would a larger operator be willing to share their users with a shared mobility startup? For a couple of reasons:

1. It supports customer retention by ensuring customer needs are met.

2. A previously established agreement between the providers — or one approved instantaneously — allows the provider offering access to their user to get some revenue based on previously agreed relationships with mobility providers. This would establish how much commission is transferred for each shared customer.

We don’t believe all mobility providers will embrace an open, transparent ecosystem, at least not in the beginning. But you can imagine over time the network effect for having a range of public and private mobility services sharing users in a city.

One step towards this has already begun, and is referred to as Mobility as a Service (MaaS). MaaS models are great in that they aggregate a set of public and private mobility services in a package for residents who can pay a monthly fee for a set amount or unlimited amount of services in a given month. We embrace MaaS models, which can easily be connected to an IoM protocol, as a great improvement over existing models. Yet, blockchain and IoM allows for an even better model. Embracing open protocols and open source software, shared mobility startups and established mobility providers can share access to users and the base tech in a way that is not exclusive. MaaS models tend to be run by private companies using proprietary software and partnering with the largest mobility services in the city. This leaves little room for mobility innovation or for the startups to gain access to the local mobility market.

We have even begun envisioning how you could blend MaaS and our open IoM thinking in the following way: Any validated mobility operator could work with an open hub aggregator to develop a monthly pricing package based on each user’s personal travel patterns. In this model, a new user could go to a website, either describe their travel patterns or have the system track them for a period of time, and then discover any mobility service, large or small. A drop-down menu would give users the option to pick and choose any service and see how much it would cost to add that service to a monthly package. Think of it as a Personalized Mobility as a Service (PMaaS).

Blockchain technology poses the potential to decentralize and democratize our economies. The Internet of Mobility could significantly enhance urban mobility users’ experience, while creating a vehicle for shared mobility startups to launch innovative services more rapidly and gain democratized access to urban mobility users.

Graphic courtesy of Boyd Cohen

Photo by mripp

The post How to power shared mobility startups with blockchain technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Two hundred people per second now climb onto a dockless bike somewhere in China; the blue dots (above) denote transactions in Shanghai.

Considering that dockless bike sharing platforms were only launched two years ago, in 2015, this growth rate is remarkable.

The biggest company, Mobike, already operates more than seven million bikes across over 160 cities globally – and a merger with its biggest rival, Ofo, is in the offing.

For its US launch Mobike (above) has teamed up with AT&T for its networks. Qualcomm will make the GPS-enabled smart tags attached to each bike. And iPhone maker Foxconn will manufacture the actual bikes.

Negative side effects have accompanied this explosive growth, of course; entrances to subway stations, for example, have been blocked by piles of carelessly dumped bikes (above) .

Beijing and  Shanghai have banned the addition of more bikes until their users learn, or are compelled, to use designated parking areas. Wayward user behaviour may well be just a blip; penalties (and inventives) cxan easily be added to dockless bike software.

When sharing platforms enable new relationships between people, goods, equipment, and spaces, the notion of mobility as a discrete economic sector no longer makes sense.

News that Ikea is buying Task Rabbit is further confirmation of this convergence

The bigger story now unfolding (above) seems to be one of system transformation – a peak-car tipping point – that’s been slowly ‘brewing’ for a very long time.

(I don’t believe the concept of  “Personal Era” is a timely one – but I’ll come to that in my next post).

For the physicist Ugo Bardi, the decline of a complex system can be faster than its growth – an insight he attributes to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who wrote:  “Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid”.

This could surely be true for a global mobility ecosystem based the private car.

After 100 years of spectacular growth, the Mobility Industrial Complex now confronts three potholes in the road ahead that could each on its own,  prove fatal.

The first is energy. Americans now use as much energy on one month as their grandparents did in their entire lifetime – and that rate of increase is accelerating with the advent of  ‘cloud commuting’ and ‘smart mobility’.  The Stack now runs on about seventeen terrawatts a day.

(The chart above is from The Cloud Begins With Coal, by Mark P. Mills)

The second un-driver of mobility is cost. It now costs 91c to travel one kilometre to travel in your own car,  but less than half that (30c/km) if you share. In some Chinese cities, where dockless bike systems are marketed like an app, you can use one for free.

The third pothole awaiting modern mobility – and it’s a big one – is complexity.

There are more lines of code in a high-end Audi than in a Boeing dreamliner – a costly feature will feel more like a bug if the coming software apocalypse turns out to be real.

“Sustainable smart mobility”, in this context, is turning out to be different in degree, but not in kind, from traditional transport and infrastructure planning. It tweaks the means, but not the ends.

Because neither the ‘need’ for perpetually growing mobility is questioned – let alone its biophysical possibility – the road on the downside of Seneca’s Cliff will be a bumpy one if a new story

In part 2 (to follow:) Smart Mobility at the Service of Civic Ecology

ADDENDUM

This writer has learned the hard way that people read things when they are ready to read them – not when they are written. In the hope that the time is now right, the articles below may, now, be useful.

From Bike Chain to Blockchain: Three Questions About Cooperation Platforms and Mobility (2015)

Until now, transportation has been planned to ‘save’ time. In this age of energy transition, would a better criterion not be, how to save calories? Who should own mobility sharing platforms: private companies? cities? us? What kind of ecosystem is needed to support the sharing platforms we want? 


Cycle Commerce: the Red Blood Cells of a Smart City (2015)

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 ecosystem, they’re also part of the metabolism that makes a city smart. That said, cycle commerce is a challenge for a city’s managers. Many different actors are involved in bicycle commerce – often with differing or downright conflicting agendas. Managing this kind of urban constellation is hard.

Cloud Commuting (2014)
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem. Mobilotoop asks, ‘how will we move in the city of the future?’  – and does not worry too much about the design of vehicles. ‘Cloud commuting’, in this context, is about accessing the means to move when they are needed (such as the micro-van, above) rather than owning a large heavy artefact (such as a Tesla) that will sit unused for 95 percent of the time.

Caloryville: The Two-Wheeled City (2014)
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.

Cycle commerce as an ecosystem (2013)

At a workshop in Delhi, Arjun Mehta and myself posed the following question to a group of 20 professionals from diverse backgrounds: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and villages?

Green Tourism: Why It Failed And How It Can Succeed (2013)

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 Morocco’s Atlas mountains, just e50 would go to the cook and the mule driver who do the work. The mule, who works hardest, gets zilch. Can green travel be reformed?

From Autobahn to Bioregion (2012)
A few years ago, Audi’s in-house future watchers noticed an unsettling trend in visions for the future of cities : an increasing number of these visions did not contain cars. Urban future scenarios seemed to be converging around car-free solutions to problems posed by debilitating gridlock, lack of space, and air pollution.Wondering what this trend meant for a car company such as itself, the company launched its Urban Future Initiative to establish a dialogue.

The Gram Junkies (2011)

Gram junkies are those fanatical hikers and climbers who fret about every gram of weight that might be carried — in everything from titanium cook pans to toothbrush covers. Excess weight is not just an objective performance issue for these guys; they take it personally. In the matter of mobility and modern transportation, we all need to become gram junkies. We need to obsess not about speed, or about exotic power sources, but about the weight of every step taken, every vehicle used, every infrastructure investment contemplated. 
http://designobserver.com/feature/the-gram-junkies-in-transportation-design-the-key-issue-is-not-speed-but-weight/24178

Is an environmentally neutral car possible? (2010)

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 100 km/h (62 mph) at Achères, near Paris.Since then, as we produced hundreds of millions non-electric cars — and despoiled the biosphere in the process — all manner of non-petrol cars, including electric ones, have come and gone.

A tale of two trains October (2010)

The fundamental problem with high-speed train systems is not that they burn too much of the wrong kind of fuel. The problem is that – like the interstate highway systems that came before – they perpetuate patterns of land use, transport intensity, and the separation of functions in space and time, that render the whole way we live unsupportable.


From my car to scalar (2006)

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?


Photo by fireflythegreat

The post Is Peak Car Headed for Seneca’s Cliff? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Driver Co-op is an online co-operative platform app owned by private hire drivers and supported by The New Economics Foundation.

The following article was written by Alice Martin, Work & Housing Lead, New Economics Foundation and originally published in Nesta’s Blog.

The New Economics Foundation plans to conduct research to support the development of an online co-operative platform app owned by private hire drivers in Bradford and Leeds.

Background

The gig economy is estimated to have grown by 72 per cent in London and 28 per cent UK-wide in the past four years. But, so far, rewards from this tech-led boom have been enjoyed by only a handful of giants such as Uber and Deliveroo.

In exchange for the promise of flexibility, the pay and conditions of gig economy workers are being driven down. And disputes are raging about whether companies are exploiting the self-employment status of their workers.

Alternative worker-owned models offer a way to give workers more control, while remaining embedded in the communities that they serve. Drivers in Bradford and Leeds are developing a co-operative, worker-owned private hire app as an alternative to the big players.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) will conduct research to test the viability of the model and support the drivers to uphold good working conditions and meet the transport needs of the local community.

Why the ShareLab Fund?

Through the ShareLab Fund, we hope to build relationships with the social technology sector, as well as local authority officers and commissioners and progressive businesses in Bradford and Leeds.

We want to learn from what has worked from other ShareLab projects, particularly on business model development and balancing commercial viability with ethical practice.

Our work as part of the ShareLab Fund programme

The fund will allow us to test the worker-owned private hire app model as a way of supporting the needs of local economies in a context of poorly paid work and local government cuts.

A co-operative, driver-owned platform integrated locally has potential to be more sustainable, as it has less of a growth or profit imperative.

As part of the user testing, we’ll explore how not just drivers but passengers could become owners or members of the model, for example through having a community share buy-in, or a multi-stakeholder ‘one member one vote’ mutual model. This would encourage local buy-in for the model and could improve economic and social outcomes locally over time.

Our hopes for the future?

The NEF will work closely with drivers to find a route into becoming a full co-operative through identifying potential barriers, such as licensing regulations, and making concrete recommendations for both the drivers and their local authorities to overcome these.

Beyond testing the viability of the app itself, we’ll extract concrete learning for how similar models could work for other service industries such as cleaners and care providers.

Photo by hau.kelvin

The post Project of the Day: Driver Co-op appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Executive summary by Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation, research) and Yurek Onzia (project coordination)

This study ^[1] was commissioned and financed by the City of Ghent, a city in northern Flanders with nearly 300,000 inhabitants, with the support of its mayor Daniel Termont, the head of the mayor’s staff, the head of the strategy department, and the political coalition of the city which consists of the Flemish Socialist Party SPA, the Flemish Greens (Groen) and the Flemish Liberal Party (Open VLD).

The request was to document the emergence and growth of the commons in the city, to offer some explanations of why this was occurring, and to determine what kind of public policies should support commons-based initiatives, based on consultation with the active citizens in Ghent.

The authors of the report are Michel Bauwens as investigator and Yurek Onzia as coordinator of the effort.

Timelab, an artistic makerspace under the leadership of Evi Swinnen, and the Greek scholar of the P2P Lab Vasilis Niaros, played important supportive roles in the realization of this project. Wim Reygaert and partners provided the graphics used in the original report. Annelore Raman coordinated the connections within the city council.

The consultation, which took place during the spring of 2017, took the form of:

1. A mapping of 500 or so commons-oriented projects per sector of activity (food, shelter, transportation, etc), through a wiki, which is available at http://wiki.commons.gent
2. 80+ one to one interviews and conversations with leading commoners and project leaders
3. A written questionnaire that was responded to by over 70 participants
4. A series of 9 workshops in which participants were invited per theme, ‘Food as a Commons’, ‘Energy as a Commons’, ‘Transportation as a Commons’, etc ..
5. A Commons Finance Canvas workshop, based on the methodology developed by Stephen Hinton, which looked into the economic opportunities, difficulties and models used by the commons projects

The report consists of four parts.

The first part provides the context on the emergence of urban commons, which has seen a tenfold increase in the Flanders in the last ten years. It focuses on the challenge it represents for the city and the public authorities, for market players, and for traditional civil society organisations, and how the new contributive logic of the commons challenges (but also enriches) the logic of representation of the European democratic polities, in this specific case, at the level of a city. It also looks at the opportunities inherent in the new models such as more active participation of inhabitants in co-constructing their cities, in solving ecological and climate change challenges, and in creating new forms of meaningful work at the local level.

The second part is an overview of urban commons developments globally, but especially in European cities, and takes a closer look at the experiences in Bologna (with the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, now adopted by many other Italian cities), Barcelona (the pro-commons policies of the new political coalition of En Comu), Frome, UK (for its civic coalition that replaced the political parties in the running of the city), and Lille, for its experience with a Assembly of the Commons as a voice and expression of the local commons.

The third part is the analysis of the urban commons in Ghent itself, highlighting some of its strengths and weaknesses.

And finally, in the fourth part, based on our analysis in the three first parts, we offer our recommendations to the City, in terms of an institutional adaptation of the city to the new commons-centric demands that emerge through the commons activities. It’s a set of 23 integrated proposals for the creation of public-commons processes for citywide co-creation. In some way, it represents the shift from urban commons to a more ambitious vision of the ‘city as a commons’.

The P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens and Vasilis (Billy) Niaros

The context for the Emergence of the Urban Commons

We define the commons as a shared resource, which is co-owned or co-governed by a community of users and stakeholders, under the rules and norms of that community. There is no commons without active co-production (commoning), and without an important measure of self-governance. Thus, it differs from both public and state- or city-owned goods, and from private property managed by its owners. Both a Dutch study by Tine De Moor (Homo Cooperans), and a study for the Flanders by the Oikos think thank have confirmed a steep rise in the number of commons-oriented civic initiatives (commons-oriented means that important aspects of the initiatives have commons’ aspects). This rise is related to a growing awareness amongst a layer of citizens that a social and ecological transition is necessary given the relative state and market failures, but also by the effects of the great economic and systemic crisis of 2008, which has seen an austerity-driven retreat from public authorities in terms of common infrastructures.

These new urban commons however do not exist ‘on their own’ as fully autonomous projects and entities but by necessity interact with both public and market forces, for access to resources and support.

Thus the commons is a challenge for the other institutions as well:

• It is a challenge for the city, as commons are a claim to both public and private resources that were governed by the city, or which may have been private properties currently in disuse . Self-governance in the commons most often takes a contributory logic, i.e. the contributors and participants manage the projects, but this doesn’t necessarily involve all the citizenry. This also poses a challenge for representative democracy. Conversely, commoners may want support, but may resent control and limitations to their autonomy.
• It is a challenge for market forces, which may feel challenged by commons projects as alternatives to privatized provision, or may profit from them in ways that are considered extractive by the commoners, or their actions may ‘enclose’ and destroy the commons, creating conflictual relations.
• But is is also a challenge to established civil society organisations, which were based on memberships, a professional cadre, and bureaucratic forms of organisation and management; elements which are often rejected in the commons initiatives.

The commons requires a ‘partner’ city, which enables and empowers commons-oriented civic initiatives. It also requires generative market forms which sustain the commons and create livelihoods for the core contributors as well as facilitative types of support from civil society organisations.

An important discovery in our analysis of the 500+ urban commons projects in Ghent, is that their structure strongly resembles that of the commons-driven digital economy. This means that at the heart of urban commons we find:

• Productive communities based on open contributions.
• That these urban commons and their platforms may generate (and are obliged to if they are to be resilient and self-sustaining over time) generative market forms — i.e. entrepreneurial coalitions that have a positive relationship with the commons and the commoners.
• The communities, platforms and possible market forms require, and receive, facilitative support from the various agencies and functionaries of the city, and the Civil Society Organisations, which have adapted to the needs of the new citizen-commoners.

This relationship is shown by the following graph:

Graphic 6: Polygovernance model.

This graph shows the five entry points of the commons economy in which the city is actively intervening (bottom), the 3 elements of the commons economy, and the public-commons processes and institutions which could be set up as a meta-structure to frame the cooperation between the city, the commoners and the generative economic entities.

It is also clear that the commons initiatives and their emerging economy, hold great potential for the social and economic life of the city.

The three main potentials are in our opinion the following:

1. The commons are an essential part of the ecological transition: shared and mutualized infrastructures have a dramatically lower footprint than systems based on ‘possessive individualism’, but on the condition that ‘it is done in the right’ and systemic way. A good counter-example is how the competition between drivers in the Uber model negates the environmental advantages of ride-hailing. Huge reductions in the material footprint (and carbon footprint) are possible with the commons-centric models.
2. The commons are a means for the re-industrialization of the city following the cosmo-local model which combines global technical cooperation in knowledge commons with smart re-localization of production; an example is how city procurement could be used to reintroduce healthy local meals for children in public schools (5 million a year, not counting other anchor institutions which could join); a combination between procurement from the urban/rural short-circuit farmers in the organic sector, carbon-free transportation (Ghent is flat, which allows for bike-cargo transport), and local cooking, would create hundreds of jobs for the local economy. Socially, this means jobs not just for the technically-savvy but for the desperate blue collar workers who have been hit hard by the ecologically unsustainable neoliberal globalization model
3. Representative democracy is, for a number of interlocking reasons, in deep crisis and facing a crisis of trust. And the world of production is still nearly entirely un-democratic. The commons however are based on the self-governance of the value producing systems and are therefore one of the few schools of true democracy and participation. Inclusive and diverse commons could be at the very least an adjunct to representative democracy, creating a system of Democracy+, augmented with participation , deliberation and multi-stakeholder governance models in cooperation with the commons initiatives.

The analysis of the situation in Ghent

The city of Ghent is a dynamic city of nearly 300k inhabitants including a huge number of young people and students. It’s a city in which the commons already have a distinct presence, with support from an active and engaged city administration.

• A tradition of center-left coalitions have created a distinct political and administrative culture with many engaged city officials. The city is actively engaged in carbon reduction, traffic reduction, and has neighborhood and social facilitators, connectors in schools, street workers and other types of staff that is actively engaged in enabling roles at the local level. This includes different kinds of support for commons-initiatives.
• The city has an important policy to support the temporary use by community groups of vacant land and buildings.
• The city counts around 500 commons-oriented initiatives in all sectors of human provisioning, such as food, shelter, mobility, etc. Many of these are active around the necessity of socio-ecological transitions in their respective domains and neighborhoods.

These positive aspects should be tempered by the following issues:

• Both the efforts of the city and the commoner’s initiatives are highly fragmented;
• There are many regulatory and administrative hurdles to hinder the expansion of commons initiatives, for example in the field of mutualized housing; (for example, we received a 7 page memo of such obstacles from housing activists).
• Though there are a number of fablabs/coworking spaces and some craft-related initiatives, there is at present a lack of activity around open design linked to real production;
• Though blessed with a large university, which is active around sustainability issues, there is very little evidence of relations between the university and the commons projects, and some of its spinoffs and players are sometimes distinctly hostile to open source and design projects;
• Though many of the leading commons activists are facing precarious lifestyles and incomes, they usually have good social and knowledge capital and mostly consist of long established inhabitants. There are many commons project in the post-migration communities, but they are mostly limited to ethnic and religious memberships, and there is as yet relatively little cross-over. They are however successful counter-examples such as the initiatives in the neighborhood Rabot.
• Old and newer Civil Society Organisations play a significant infrastructural and support role for maintaining urban commons projects, but perhaps perceive them to be mainly directed towards vulnerable population groups and not as key and highly productive resources.
• Despite the city support, the major potential commons are largely enclosed and vulnerable to private extraction; the current models do not challenge the mainstream consensus but find a way to co-exist with the major imbalances.
• Despite its long history of self-organization with the guilds in the middle ages and a very strong labor movement in the 19th century, the cooperative sector and its support mechanisms are quite weak; there is a weak if not inexistent support infrastructure for a specifically generative and cooperative economy that could work with commons infrastructures.

The proposals for the city administration

The general logic of our proposals is to put forward realistic but important institutional innovations that can lead to further progress and expansion of the urban commons in Ghent in order to successfully achieve its ecological and social goals. We propose public-social or public-partnership based processes and protocols to streamline cooperation between the city and the commoners in every field of human provisioning.

We are not summarizing all proposals here, merely the underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Commons initiatives can forward their proposals and need for support to a City Lab, which prepares a ‘Commons Accord’ between the city and the commons initiative, modeled after the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. Based on this contract, the city sets-up specific support alliances which combine the commoners and civil society organisations, the city itself, and the generative private sector, in order to organize support flows.

Graphic 9 describes a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support, divided in ‘transition arenas’.

Graphic 9 describes a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support, divided in ‘transition arenas’.

The model comes from the existing practice around the food transition, which is far from perfect and has its problems, but nevertheless has in our opinion the core institutional logic that can lead to more successful outcomes.

The city has indeed created an initiative, Gent en Garde, which accepts the five aims of civil society organisations active in the food transition (local organic food, fairly produced), which works as follows. The city has initiated a Food Council, which meets regularly and could contribute to food policy proposals. The Food Council is representative of the current forces at play, and has both the strength and weaknesses of representative organisations. The Food Council contain a contributive ‘food working group’ which mobilizes those effectively working at the grassroots level on the food transition by following a contributive logic, where every contributor has a voice. In our opinion, this combination of representative and contributory logic is what can create a super-competent Democracy+ institution that goes beyond the limitations of representation and integrates the contributive logic of the commoners. But how can the commoners exert significant political weight?. This requires voice and self-organisation. We therefore propose the creation of an Assembly of the Commoners, for all citizens active in the co-construction of commons, and a Chamber of the Commons, for all those who are creating livelihoods around these commons, in order to create more social power for the commons.

This essential process of participation can be replicated across the transition domains, obtaining city and institutional support for a process leading to Energy as a Commons, Mobility as a Commons, Housing, Food, etc.

We also propose the following: (not exhaustive)

• The creation of a juridical assistance service consisting of at least one representative of the city and one of the commoners, in order to systematically unblock the potential for commons expansion, by finding solutions for regulatory hurdles.
• The creation of an incubator for a commons-based collaborative economy, which specifically deals with the challenges of generative start-ups.
• The creation of an investment vehicle, the bank of the commons, which could be a city bank based on public-social governance models.
• Augmenting the capacity of temporary land and buildings, towards more permanent solutions to solve the land and housing crisis affecting commoners and citizens.
• Support of platform cooperatives as an alternative to the more extractive forms of the sharing economy.
• Assisting the development of mutualized commons infrastructures (‘protocol cooperativism’), through inter-city cooperation (avoiding the development of 40 Uber alternative in as many cities).
• Make Ghent ‘the place to be’ for commoners by using ‘Ghent, City of the Commons’ as an open brand, to support the coming of visitors for commons-conferences etc.
• As pioneered by the NEST project of temporary use of the old library, use more ‘calls for commons’, instead of competitive contests between individual institutions. Calls for the commons would reward the coalition that creates the best complementary solution between multiple partners and open sources its knowledge commons to support the widest possible participation.

We also propose

• A specific project to test the capacity of ‘cosmo-local production’ to create meaningful local jobs (organic food for school lunches) and to test the potential role of anchor institutions and social procurement.
• The organisation of a CommonsFest on the 28th of October, with a first Assembly of the Commons.
• A pilot project around ‘circular finance’ in which ‘saved negative externalities’ which lead to savings in the city budget can directly be invested in the commons projects that have achieved such efficiencies (say re-investing the saved cost of water purification to support the acquisition of land commons for organic farmers).
• The setting up of an experimental production unit based on distributed manufacturing and open design.
• Projects that integrate knowledge institutions such as the university, with the grassroots commons projects.

^[1] A slightly graphically improved version of the official Dutch language version of the report can be found here. Suggested citation: Commons Transitie Plan voor de Stad Gent. Michel Bauwens en Yurek Onzia. Ghent, Belgium: City of Ghent and P2P Foundation, 2017
Header photo by estefaniabarchietto

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These investors rewarded criminality, and may have emboldened those who find civility and the law inconvenient. The company’s “don’t ask permission, ask for forgiveness later” strategy is now part of the Silicon Valley startup playbook. Thousands of entrepreneurs now likely believe that breaking the law is fine for the sake of disruption. I think many people underestimate the damage that Uber has done because they look mostly at the individual actions of the company, and not at the long-lasting, toxic impact of its example.

By choosing to back such an enterprise, investors have attacked the common good. Like Uber’s ex-CEO himself admitted that he needs to “fundamentally change as a leader and grow up,” they need to do the same — as does the tech industry in general. Tech leaders need to start acting like states persons because that’s the level of power they now wield on the national and global stages. Tech is now the establishment, but the greed, insularity, insensitivity, and hubris exhibited regularly tower over whatever wisdom there is in this space.

Firing the CEO doesn’t solve the systemic problems that run rampant not just at Uber, but other companies that emulate it and Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem in general. It doesn’t redeem the company’s chronic wrongdoing. Investing isn’t just a financial decision, it’s also a moral one. Deciding to back Uber so lavishly despite its criminality is a moral failure of epic proportions. Users can #DeleteUber. Pundits can call Uber what it is — an illegal enterprise. Reporters can investigate Uber further. Or regulators can just shut it down.

But no one is beyond redemption. Investors can do a thorough job of reforming the company (if that’s even possible). As for Kalanick, he’s a product of his environment. He’s responsible, but so is the ecosystem he’s part of. It enabled him. He can turn a new leaf.

Society can do better too. People can can support and create alternatives, like platform cooperatives, where all stakeholders can have a say and a share in a tech enterprise. There’s RideAustin in the U.S., Stocksy United in Canada, and Fairmondo in Germany, all examples of enterprises that put people and community first. We can also create alternatives to Silicon Valley’s wealth-concentrating ecosystem, like the Emilia Romagna region in Italy, where wealth-spreading cooperatives produce 30 percent of its GDP. More than a possibility, it seems a necessity if we value freedom, fairness, and a future worth having.

Cross-posted from Shareable.

Photo by marki1983

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Nithin Coca: With all the controversy engulfing the global ride-hailing giant Uber, there is more attention on alternative platforms that meet people’s transportation needs and don’t have the company’s ethical baggage. One of the newest and most promising alternatives is LibreTaxi, founded by Roman Pushkin, a San Francisco-based developer and architect with a decade of experience in the technology sector.

LibreTaxi is a completely open-source project, meaning that developers can take the source code and adapt it for local uses. Since it was launched in Dec. 2016, the app, which can be used to find rides across the globe, has grown to 20,000 users. The highest use so far is in Taiwan, Iran, and Russia.

Currently, it is a simple app that can be downloaded and used on the messaging platform Telegram. Through its easy-to-use bot, riders and drivers are directly connected and negotiate prices independently of LibreTaxi, and pay fares in cash. We talked with Pushkin about LibreTaxi, its origins, and how it fits into the larger, ride-hailing and ride-sharing ecosystem.

Nithin Coca: Where did the idea for LibreTaxi originate from? Why did you decide to make it an open-source project?

Roman Pushkin: The idea came from where I was born, in Russia, in a village located far from any big city. There, there were no services like Uber. There was just this list, a piece of paper with phone numbers, and when people were looking for a ride, they were just calling by each number from this list. It was not very convenient, so we tried to improve it with computers. Initially we used Skype chat for this purpose. It worked, but it was not very convenient either – when someone needs a ride you have to scan through all of the messages — where you go, your location, etc.

Public chat is not solving this problems efficiency — it works, but not that great. So I started looking for a way to create application for this purpose. The aim was to create something like Uber, but open source, and free for everyone. Hence, LibreTaxi. LibreTaxi was originally created for rural areas – but also works in cities too.

LibreTaxi is open source because people from India, North and South America, China, from Russia, from any part of the world should be able to use it and customize it.

How is LibreTaxi different from Uber and Lyft?

There are three main differences. The first thing — LibreTaxi is free for drivers. Second,  anyone can register, and anyone can become a driver in just one minute. And the third difference, there’s no built in payment system, so passengers have to pay drivers with cash.

Actually, the aim of LibreTaxi is not to compete with Uber directly. If someone tries to build an application to compete with Uber, this battle is lost already. They spend a lot of money on app development and promotion in different countries.

LibreTaxi is different, and its target is different audiences. For example, in many Latino Communities across the U.S., there are people who are not eligible to work in the U.S., so they can’t drive for Uber. Also, in those communities, many people have outdated vehicles, which are more than 10 years old, so Uber won’t accept you as a driver. There’s no such problem with LibreTaxi. It will be much easier to use LibreTaxi inside that community, to give rides to people you already know. LibreTaxi has the same concept as Uber, but in reality, it is completely different.

We’re targeting different people, people who already know who their passengers are, who their drivers are, and we hope that LibreTaxi can help their own community.

What is your growth strategy going forward? How can you achieve financial stability while also meeting user needs?

Right now, I am working on this only when I have time, in evenings, weekends, but I am planning to work on this full-time. For this, LibreTaxi needs to be more organized.

The very first thing is that we are planning to do create a nonprofit organization for LibreTaxi, because I want people to know that this service is absolutely free, and will stay that way. We are not going to charge drivers and cut their earnings like Uber does. Second thing is that the nonprofit can help us make this application more user friendly, safer, and help us polish some rough edges. Our financial model will be based on donations. We’re not looking to make a lot of money, and we’re not going to be a middleman between passengers and drivers.

Right now, I am paying for all the servers out of my pocket. I can afford that for now, but for the future, if we reach one million users, as is our goal in the next two or three years, we may need more servers than we have now.

Actually, the name LibreTaxi is inspired by LibreOffice, which is a free and open source replacement for Microsoft Office, and they are our model. They are a nonprofit that takes donations, and they’ve grown to 75 million users, and they expect it to be 200 million users by 2020.

Another thing we are considering is to add Blockchain technology to LibreTaxi. Not sure how this will be implemented, as Blockchain is something very new, and we are very early in this game, but, for example, we could enable payments via Bitcoin.

Have the recent, seemingly non-stop headlines about Uber brought more attention, or more users, to LibreTaxi?

Partially, the success, so far, of LibreTaxi was possible because of these events that happened to Uber. But only partially, because LibreTaxi is not the same as Uber. I am working on this application alone, by myself, so it’s not possible to build a shiny app, with all these features like Uber.

How many users do you have? Can Shareable readers download LibreTaxi and expect to find rides (or riders) easily?

It is very [easy] to install the application — just need to install Telegram, and then you can find LibreTaxi, or you can go to our website and follow the instructions.

As for finding rides, we have little bit more than 20,000 users worldwide at the moment, a good number for a two-month-old project. If you look for a ride in areas like Taiwan, or Iran, or Moscow, I think it is possible to find a ride. But if you are looking in other cities, maybe you’ll find a ride, or maybe you won’t.

Even if you can’t find a ride, I hope your readers will be interested in this application because they can use it for their own communities, their own small cities, and even for their own buildings. For example, I live in a complex with 100 apartments, and I’ve listed an advertisement on the wall, where people usually walk by. Now, sometimes I give rides to my neighbors, so you can use this application right now and even try it in your building, or family.

What’s the next step for LibreTaxi, and how do you plan to grow in the future? Do you have a financial plan to ensure both a better product, and sustainability?

Our plan for this year is to add more languages. We’ve already translated the application to 17 languages, and the website is translated to 12 languages. By adding more languages, we hope to reach more people in these countries.

The next step is for us to listen to people about what they need, expect, and see in the application. We want to deliver features they would like to see. Right now, LibreTaxi is something very fresh and it has minimal functionality.

Users are the key to our growth. That’s why we ask, if they like this application, please spread the news — share it in Facebook, public chat channels, etc. It is very important because we do not have any budget for promoting LibreTaxi.

I’m constantly looking for feedback, connections, so if anyone is interested in talking to me, they can find my email on GitHub. Feel free to reach out and tell me about your community, about transportation problems you have, and I’ll try to help you and learn something new from you.

Header photo of traffic in Bangkok, Thailand, by Connor Williams via unsplash

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Introduction: MaaS vs MaaC

Mobility has become a basic need for people. The quality of life for people is closely related to access to mobility. The question arises whether mobility should not be treated as such, as a public good, as commons. Partly this is already the case, roads and public transport systems are financed largely with public money. However, the voice of citizens and hence users is rarely heard when it comes to the development of our mobility, we depend on the decisions made by politicians and executive boards. These choices are often poorly justified and some propositions made are demonstrably unwise and futile and solely proposed for political gain. Mobility is at present a political and public issue and we, the people, are not part of the decision making process.
I would like to propose to use a different strategy and manage our mobility and space requirements as commons. It concernes a radically new way of decision making on the vehicles and especially the necessary infrastructure to be created and how we maintain and operate these vehicles and infrastructure. Mobility as a Commons, instead of Mobility as a Service.
The transition takes places on the axes:

• the shift from ownership to access
• automation

Both developments are very promising and we already have most of the technical details figured out to start implementing new concepts. In this article I want to explain what that means in a utopian future vision and what initiatives we can take today to allow MaaC on a small scale and thus set this transition in motion.

Utopia

The Natural City is a laboratory for utopian thinking. For the transport transition I’m working on a transition based on a utopia. A destination that we never reach because Utopia is by definition unattainable. Utopia’s unattainability is also its strength. Since the utopia is not the goal, we can not fail, and it can serve as inspiration. Since the utopia is based on concepts that are technically and socially possible, we can continue to adapt this vision of utopia with new insights and shape the transition. Utopia and the transition are therefore flexible designs that are infinitively in development.

The transition

The transition is the indefinite time span between today and utopia. This period will also need to be designed, especially when talking about complex issues such as urban mobility. Designing starts at the end, so from utopia back to today.

Mobility

As stated above, developments in mobility are set on two axes, the shift from ownership to access and automation. On both issues a completely new paradigm will not be created overnight. The transition should be designed. Technological developments provide opportunities and social developments are slowly pushing for a change in behaviour. Both need to be developed with a utopian vision in mind.

Imagination

If we do not collectively imagine what we want, others, mostly commercial parties, will shape the future of our mobility. A self-fulfilling prophecy, not based on vision, but based on predictions and commercial interests. Take a close look at Uber and you might get an idea of where we will be headed if we do not take control.

Utopia: MaaC

A city where no fossil fuels are required for the mobility needs of its residents and visitors. In this city, every place is connected through a network of high-quality vehicles. This network consists of vacuum tubes with a diameter of 1.5 meters. The capsules moving through these tubes are accelerated with the aid of magnetic levitation and superconductivity. The size of the vehicles is based on a large car and optimised to ensure that virtually all goods shipped around the globe fit therein. For people, the capsules have an optimised design for travel comfort.

The system is fully automated and the network is as dense as our current road network. Each part of the network has its own speed. 60km/h within cities, 300km/h on a regional scale, 1500km/h at a national scale and up to to 3000km/h for continental transport. With a maximum speed of 6500 km/h for intercontinental transport no place on earth is out of reach. The costs for the construction and maintenance of this system are so low that every inhabitant of the earth can have unlimited mobility for a low monthly fee. The entire system is controlled by a global cooperative with local departments. Decisions on the development of the system are made by means of a collaborative platform that connects all stakeholders. These networks ensure that the questions are answered by the appropriate members. The more a specific decision influences the life of a member, the more weight is applied to his opinion. Every inhabitant of the earth has access to unlimited mobility for a low monthly fee. Whether you go from Amsterdam to Haarlem, or from Paris to Beijing, the cost is almost equal thanks to the extremely low energy consumption. Only acceleration and braking require energy, the rest of the trip is nearly energy neutral.

ET3 is a type of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) which is ready for production today and is the inspiration for this new network.

The same network can also serve as an energy storage. Because of the nearly energy-neutral character of the system, renewable energy can be stored as kinetic energy by speeding up the capsules.

ECN presented this principle of energy storage in 2015 in the form of an energy-train.

This network is the new main infrastructure. In addition, people will be free to move on bikes, e-bikes and electric vehicles using the open and above-ground infrastructure. The amount of roads will be drastically reduced given that fact that all transported goods and most of the necessary displacements of people will be handled in the new network. What remains is a city where there is no more need for parking and with very little infrastructure. A city where public space is used for high-quality life. A city where the predominant sounds and smells of traffic finally belong to the past. A city where children can play almost everywhere without danger.

This vision is based on a fully automated network of vehicles in a world where these vehicles are no longer personal possessions but belong to the global commons.

The transition

The rollout of the ETT system

Before city residents are willing to get into a vehicle, this system needs to be tested extensively. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that we can immediately start with construction in the city. The first step in the transition to a new transport system can consist of providing an alternative for the flow of goods and waste at a regional level. Before the network is rolled out, overburdened connections can be relieved at a regional scale. For instance, we can consider the port of Rotterdam and a connection between Schiphol and Aalsmeer. Given the dimensions of the system it is relatively simple to build an addition next to motorways.

When the technical and economic feasibility has been proven, work can start on the construction in urban areas to slowly connect each address.

Autonomous vehicles

As a precursor to a fully automated transport system in a closed and controlled environment, the transition to autonomous vehicles can take place on our existing infrastructure. Specific lanes on our highways can quite simply accommodate autonomous trucks and cars. The development of new, smaller autonomous vehicles can increase the capacity of our existing infrastructure tremendously. When we consider how much empty space is being transported in our current vehicles there is an enormous potential for improvement. We can also imagine small couplable vehicles that can take any size that is needed. Prototypes are currently being developed.

 animation: NEXT Future Transportation

What is the result of the above developments? What can a city like Amsterdam look like when we use autonomous vehicles and e-bikes on a large scale? This is the question we asked with THNK School for Creative Leadership in 2016 for un Urban Mobility Lab commissioned by the municipality of Amsterdam based on the results of a workshop during which we have defined an ideal situation with the participants. The starting point was a new network of e-bike highways and specific corridors for autonomous vehicles.

These autonomous vehicles can also be manually controlled which could lead to new forms of public transport. For each trip from someones front door to the autonomous lanes drivers can be used. The driver can then get off at the autonomous hub and the trip is continued autonomously in the vehicle until it needs to be driven again by a human being. The next driver gets in and brings the passenger to where he or she needs to go. In short, a door-to-door solution of public transport for the city. Car ownership has become useless in cities hence rendering all parking spots unnecessary. Besides autonomous vehicles some intensively used and efficient metro and tram lines in the city will remain operational. Based on the above assumptions, we have redesigned three nodes in Amsterdam. The principles and designs have been created with the help of a traffic consultant.

On this site you can see “before” and “after” images of the nodes:

Ownership to access

Before the above features are fully available, we will have to rely on our current transport systems. Currently we have an enormous fleet for our car mobility. Most people have their own car, often even several cars. Studies show that to respond to our car mobility needs we can use far fewer cars. Cars sit idle most of the time. Even at the peak moments during the day we only use a small part of our fleet. As Jeremy Rifkin writes in “Zero Marginal Cost Society,” “Incredibly, Burns (the corporate vice president of research, development, and planning at General Motors until 2009 and Currently professor of engineering at the University of Michigan) Admits that” about 80% Fewer shared, coordinated vehicles would be needed than Personally owned vehicles providence to the same level of mobility, with less investment “. The first step on the road to utopia is therefore to implement on a much larger scale the concept of car sharing. This requires new forms of cooperation that we are currently developing in The Hague. To promote the use of “commoning” to manage our streets, we created an animation to show the potential of car sharing in a street in The Hague.

To show the effect of behavioural change in one or more blocks, a partnership is needed with the municipality and some other local commonors. We are working on a process in which people are encouraged to park their cars elsewhere (temporarily) and start sharing car. The group of shared cars is composed by the residents themselves. The amount and different type of cars dependent on the usage profiles of the participants. Initially, this takes the form of a pilot. During this pilot participants will save money (the car will be parked elsewhere allowing them to save money on insurance and taxes) and can experience what it is like to use a group of shared cars. In addition, the vacant parking spaces will be used for other functions. The design for the public space liberated with the disappearance of a large amount of cars will be made in a collaborative way by the residents and the city, based on some sort of menu provided by the urban designers of the city. This to ensure that the proposals made by the residents are realistic and thus realisable. If this experiment pleases the participants, they can choose to make this situation permanent.

The cars are owned by the Mobility Cooperative. The cooperative has local teams that manage their own fleet of cars. The cooperative platform ensures that you can use mobility solutions owned by the cooperative throughout the whole city. The mobility fleet can consist of e-bikes, transport bikes, cars, vans, and so on. You can also image a large amount of services that can be added to the platform like ride-sharing, pick-up and drop-off services, grocery pick-up and so on. All these services can be “payed” in mobility minutes meaning that every time you help someone out with his or her mobility needs, you get the opportunity to consume mobility when you need to.

This is the predecessor of the global cooperation we want to use to connect the entire world. Due to the cooperative nature of this solution it offers the highest quality for the lowest price.

Conclusion

The transition to MaaC requires vision and design skills. I have tried to put a project out there and hope other thinkers and designers get inspired to work further on this and, by all means, criticise the above proposition. In 2017 we will develop a cooperative platform that will be the start of the transition. This platform will start in The Hague but needs affiliates in other cities. To have the impact we need to have it is imperative that mobility experts unite and start collaborating with the inhabitants of the cities instead of with the politically motivated organisations they tend to work with today. Get on board and let’s start working on Mobility as a Commons.

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One of the interesting effects of advancing technology is a progressive reduction in economies of scale in many industries and systems. Some of the bottleneck technologies you note do have some interesting, if still speculative, alternatives.

New proposed systems like SkyTran or Hyperloop have significantly lower economies of scale than conventional rail–deliberately so because they find themselves challenged by political conservatives increasingly resistant to ‘big ticket’ infrastructure investments.

There have also been small scale systems overlooked in the conventional urban context,

like cable car systems or, one of my favorites, the ‘banana monorail’ which has been experimentally adapted to passenger use in the developing world context.

These have always looked like a lot of fun to me, and could have potential space applications as the supports for the cableway can be designed to be self-supporting and quick-deployable.

Monorail

The WireRoad (TarBato in Nepali) is a low-cost, pedal-powered monorail transport system for people and goods, modified by EcoSystems/VillageTech Solutions from an original technology called the ‘banana cableway’. Those industrial systems cover many hundred thousand kilometers, and carry ‘trains’ of bananas, pulled by a worker who walks under the wire. EcoSystems modified the cableway to provide an alternative all-weather, self-propelled transport system, with low environmental impact, using human- or electric-power. In agricultural areas, it can pass over the fields, so it does not displace agricultural use of the lands.

Train

In Cambodia there was an aid program to encourage rural development through the supply of a kind of simple general purpose modular motor that could be adapted to many uses. One of the ingenious uses devised by locals was a simple rail car that could be used on the long-abandoned traditional rail system. Called the ‘bamboo train’, these have now become something of a tourist attraction in themselves.

These trains run through the countryside around Battambang in Cambodia. They are an incredibly simple design and as the name suggest are made of a considerable amount of bamboo, which gives great strength for little weight. They run on the old railway lines that were built by the French when Cambodia was still a colony. So who gets right of way? Well the rule is the train with the most passengers gets right of way. However if a train is carrying a motorbike it has right of way over a train carrying more passengers. However everyone seems to take it in their stride and help each other out in taking the trains off the tracks.

Shipping

Shipping now finds competition, at least in some niches, from revived sailing vessels, such as the Fair Trade Cruisers which now travel to the under-served markets of West Africa and South America. With the benefit of new
technology, new kinds of sailing vessels based on technologies like rigid solar wingsails, offer potential to make this increasingly viable.

I think these things represent a long term trend in the Post-Industrial era.

Industrial demassification is driven by the shrinking economies of scale afforded by advancing technology–one of the key factors eroding Industrial Age paradigms from within.

Photo by Bob P. B.

The post Vernacular Transport appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Photo by Tar.Digital

In the sharing economy, transportation is about accessibility, not ownership. By facilitating access to shared cars (carsharing), shared trips (ridesharing), and bikes (public bikesharing), cities can reduce road congestion and air pollution, reduce personal vehicle ownership and associated costs,1 reduce parking demand, repurpose valuable land dedicated to parking spaces,2 enhance mobility for those who do not own a car, and increase use of alternative modes of transportation like public transit, walking, or biking.3

Shareable transportation is a smart way to decrease our astounding levels of wasted and underutilized transportation resources. Privately owned vehicles in the U.S. sit idle more than 90 percent of the day, on average;4 carsharing reduces this waste while increasing car access.5 Ridesharing fills empty seats in private vehicle trips reducing road congestion and parking demand. Bikesharing systems around the world have increased cycling populations and supported a modal shift from motor vehicle travel to cycling,6 increasing transit connections and use, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, and improving public health.7 These solutions convey noteworthy economic, time, public health, and environmental cost savings both to users and to cities.

Carsharing can take several forms. Models range from Personal Vehicle Sharing, or “Peer-to-Peer” (P2P)8, where individuals share access to personal vehicles in order to offset the costs of ownership, to “Business-to-Consumer” (B2C), where carsharing companies make their fleet of vehicles available to members of that service. Carsharing can be administered casually, such as by a group of neighbors who purchase a car for shared use, or it can be administered formally, such as by for-profit companies, governments, or nonprofits that own and operate a fleet of vehicles available to members at unattended access points throughout a region.

Ridesharing has recently been made simpler and more streamlined than ever, thanks to technological innovations that make it efficient to find a shared ride. Ridesharing can be facilitated in a variety of ways, including by nonprofit ride matching sites, ridesharing companies, employers, neighborhoods, and casual carpooling.

Public Bikesharing is an efficient, environmentally sound, and economically feasible form of public transportation9 that can even offer public health benefits. Intended for short distance trips between 0.5 to 3 miles,10 bikesharing systems allow flexibility to rent and return bicycles at any station across the region served and thereby facilitate one-way travel. Bikesharing addresses the “first and last mile” conundrum that is a challenge for public transit users and planners alike.11 Bikesharing systems can be privately operated, publicly owned and operated, and even run by community-focused non-profits.12

Shareable transportation is growing globally13 – and for good reason. It’s time for more cities to hop on board and reap the benefits. That said, the above recommendations should not be seen as a replacement for continued investment in public transportation such as subways, light rail, and bus. The new modes reviewed above should be integrated into transportation planning, complement if not stimulate use of existing public transportation, and offer the public additional transportation choices.

WHAT STEPS CAN A CITY TAKE TO PROMOTE SHAREABLE TRANSPORTATION?

1. DESIGNATED, DISCOUNTED, OR FREE PARKING FOR CARSHARING

We recommend that cities designate parking spaces for carsharing vehicles, particularly near public transit facilities and multi-unit housing.

Carsharing users most commonly cite convenient locations and guaranteed parking as major motivation for participation, and carsharing operators most commonly cite lack of access to a dense network of parking spaces for carsharing as a limit to expansion.14 Cities can therefore increase carsharing participation by making parking spaces available for shared vehicles both on streets and in off-street public lots and garages.15

City policies can include:

(a) provisions for on-street parking

(b) exemptions to parking time limits

(c) creation of carsharing parking zones

(d) free or reduced cost parking spaces or parking permits

(e) universal parking permits (i.e., carsharing vehicles can be returned to any on-street location)

(f) formalized processes for assigning on-street parking spaces16

Examples:

Washington, D.C. – D.C. began offering free on-street parking spaces to carsharing operators in 2005 and later auctioned 84 curbside spots to three operators, generating almost $300,000 in revenue. This pioneering parking strategy was a “win-win” for the city and carsharing providers, and added convenience for carshare users.17

San Francisco, CA – On July 1, 2013, San Francisco will extend its earlier six-month, on-street carshare parking pilot as a part of the SFMTA’s proposed carsharing policy.18 The idea behind leasing parking spaces to carsharing operators in densely populated areas is to increase visibility and accessibility of carsharing19. Meanwhile, the bulk of carsharing parking is provided off-street in municipal parking lots at a discounted carpool rate (approximately 50 percent of the full monthly rate).20

2. INCORPORATE CARSHARING PROGRAMS IN NEW MULTI-UNIT DEVELOPMENTS

We recommend that cities subsidize, incentivize, or require carsharing programs in new multi-unit developments. Close proximity of a carsharing vehicle relieves many households from needing a second car or from owning a vehicle altogether.21 The shared vehicle can be administered by a condo-owners’ association or apartment management, or by a third party carsharing program.

Example:

San Francisco, CA – The city’s Planning Code now requires that newly constructed buildings provide permanent carshare parking spaces and that certain nonresidential developments dedicate 5 percent of their parking spaces to “short-term, transient use by vehicles from certified car sharing organizations” or other similar “co-operative auto programs.”22 OrdInance 286-10 authorizes the Planning Commission to require developers or project owners to pay annual carsharing membership fees for residents of new developments.23 In addition, the city granted a variance to construct the 141-unit Symphony Towers apartments with only 51 parking spaces (as opposed to the otherwise required 141), in part because of the commitment for two carsharing parking spaces and because the tenants were to pay extra for the use of a parking space, thereby disincentivizing car ownership.24

3. ALLOW RESIDENTIAL PARKING SPOT LEASING FOR CARSHARING

We recommend that cities allow residents to lease residential parking spaces for the purpose of parking shared vehicles.

By allowing residential driveways and parking spaces to be leased as an accessory or permitted use of a residential property, cities can enable homeowners to earn supplemental income for unused or underutilized residential parking, and create room for the growth of carsharing.

4. APPLY MORE APPROPRIATE LOCAL TAXES ON CARSHARING

We recommend that cities more closely align taxes on carsharing with the general sales tax for other goods and services.

Unreasonably high fees and taxes – originally intended to extract revenue from car rentals of airport travelers – are disproportionately affecting local carsharing users25 slow the growth of carsharing.26 Policymakers should use codified definitions or certification processes to distinguish between traditional car rental companies and carsharing organizations and ensure that only organizations generating significant public benefits would receive reduced taxation.27 At the very least, cities should make carsharing tax exempt in lower income urban areas with disadvantaged populations and high unemployment; foregoing tax revenue in these areas may be a small price to pay for the mobility benefits that sharing vehicles provides underserved residents.28 Examples:

Chicago, IL, Boston, MA, and Portland, OR – These cities have made noteworthy efforts to lower carsharing tax rates with political success. They make distinctions between carsharing and traditional car rental in their municipal codes.”29

A company-sponsored ride-share program in action. Photo credit: buzzerblog / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND.

5. CREATE ECONOMIC INCENTIVES FOR RIDESHARING

We recommend that cities create and promote economic incentives for ridesharing, like high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, designated or discounted parking, or waived or reduced tolls.

Cities can encourage carpooling by building or expanding HOV lanes along high- traffic routes. Demand for ridesharing typically exists along routes where carpooling lanes offer significant time savings or allow carpoolers to take advantage of direct economic incentives like waiver of tolls and discount parking.30

6. DESIGNATE RIDESHARING PICK-UP SPOTS AND PARK-AND-RIDE LOTS

We recommend that cities help meet demand for ridesharing by designating convenient locations as casual carpool pick-up spots and park-and-ride lots.

For decades, casual carpool, or “slugging,” has been taking place in U.S cities with congested roadways, including in Washington, D.C, Houston, Seattle, and in areas where HOV lanes offer significant travel time reduction in peak travel times, like the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.31 Designating ridesharing pick-up spots is as easy as putting up a sign near a congested thoroughfare or freeway onramp to encourage carpoolers to gather, connect with drivers going the same way, and take advantage of the time and cost savings of HOV lanes.

In cases where ridesharing is not possible for one’s entire commute, park-and-ride lots make it possible for commuters to park and consolidate into fewer vehicles before embarking on the remainder of their trip. In many cases, cities do not even need to build new parking for this purpose, but could rather contract with parking lots that are typically not used during weekdays, such as church parking lots.

7. CREATE A LOCAL OR REGIONAL GUARANTEED RIDE HOME PROGRAM

We recommend that cities and regional agencies offer a Guaranteed Ride Home program to serve carpoolers in the event of unexpected emergencies.

Many people choose not to carpool because they feel insecure about the fact that they cannot leave work at any time in case of emergency. Cities and regions with Guaranteed Ride Home programs give carpoolers peace of mind by covering the cost of a taxi ride or rental car in the event of emergencies or in case of an unexpected departure of the carpool partner(s).

Examples:

Minneapolis, MN – The Guaranteed Ride Home program offers four rides or up to $100 (whichever comes first) each year to commuters who ride the bus, light rail, or carpool, vanpool, bicycle or walk to work or school at least three times per week.32

Other Cities with Similar Programs: Atlanta (five free rides per year)33, Baltimore/Central Maryland/D.C. Area (four per year)34, Alexandria, Virginia (four per year)35, Los Angeles (two per year)36, and many other cities.

Bikesharing in New York City. Photo credit: drpavloff / Foter.com / CC BY-NC.

8. ADOPT A CITY-WIDE PUBLIC BIKESHARING PROGRAM

The most common reason for not bicycling is lack of access to a bicycle.37 We recommend that cities create and manage city-wide bikesharing programs to provide that access.

Bikesharing programs enable individuals who may otherwise not use bicycles (i.e. tourists, individuals who do not own a bicycle, or those who do not have access to bicycle storage) to enjoy the benefits of cycling on an “as-needed” basis and without the responsibility of ownership.38

Sample Bikesharing Funding Strategies:

Washington, DC: The $6 million Capital Bikeshare program is funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration under their Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement fund and other local funding.39

Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN: Funding for the initial $3 million capital cost of launching Nice Ride included $1.75 million from the federal Non-motorized Transportation Pilot Program administered by Bike Walk Twin Cities and Transit for Livable Communities (TLC), as well as $1 million of tobacco settlement proceeds from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, and $250,000 from the Minneapolis Convention Center fund.40

Boston, MA: Boston’s Hubway bikeshare program is completely funded by grants totaling $4.5 million including $3 million from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), $450,000 from the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) and $250,000 from the Metropolitan Planning Organiza- tion’s Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) grant program.41

Denver, CO: Initial funding for B-Cycle came from a $1 million donation from the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee, and Kaiser Permanente granted a three-year, $450,000 grant. Additional contributions came from key private foundations and corporations, making Denver B-Cycle entirely independent from city tax dollars.42

Recommended Guide: The FHA’s definitive 2012 guide for feasibility, implementation and evaluation of bikesharing operations in the U.S.43

1 Martin, Elliot and Susan Shaheen, “Greenhouse Gas Emission Impacts of Carsharing in North America,” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Volume 12, Issue 4: 1074-1086 (2011).

2 Shaheen, Susan, Cohen, Adam, “Innovative Mobility Carsharing Outlook: Carsharing Market Overview, Analysis, and Trends,” Transportation Sustainability Research Center (5 Dec. 2012), http://tsrc. berkeley.edu/node/629.

3 Bieszczat, Alice, Schwieterman, Joe, “My Car, Your Car,” Magazine of the American Planning Association pp. 37-40 (May/June 2012).

4 Hampshire, Robert C., Gaites, Craig, “Peer-to-Peer Carsharing: Market Analysis and Potential Growth,” Transportation Research Record Vol 2217 (2011).

5 Cervero, Robert, “TOD and Carsharing: A Natural Marriage,” ACCESS, Vol 35 P. 28 (Fall 2009). 6 Shaheen, Susan, Guzman, Stacey, “Worldwide Bikesharing,” ACCESS, Vol 39 P. 24 (Fall 2011).

7 DeMaio, Paul. “Bikesharing: History, Impacts, Models of Provision, and Future,” Journal of Public Transportation Vol. 12, No. 4 (2009), http://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bike-sharing-Mod- els-of-Provision-Paul-DeMaio-09-12.pdf.

8 Shaheen, Susan, Mark Mallery, and Kingsley, Karla, “Personal Vehicle Sharing Services in North America,” Research in Transportation Business & Management (2012).

9 Shaheen, Susan, Guzman, Stacey, “Worldwide Bikesharing,” ACCESS, Vol 39 (Fall 2011), http://tsrc. berkeley.edu/sites/tsrc.berkeley.edu/files/Worldwide%20Bikesharing.pdf.

10 “Bike Sharing in the United States: State of the Practice and Guide to Implementation,” Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation (Sep. 2012).

11 “Seattle Bicycle Share Feasibility Study,” Bike-Share Studios, University of Washington College of Built Environments. Available at: http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/library/details.cfm?id=4719.

12 Shaheen, Susan, “Early Understanding of Public Bikesharing in North America,” CalACT 2012 Autumn Conference. Powerpoint Presentation p. 10 (Sep. 2012), http://www.calact.org/assets/confer-ences/2012%20Fall%20Conference/Bike-Sharing_Shaheen.pdf.

13 Shaheen, Susan, Cohen, Adam, “Growth in Worldwide Carsharing: An International Comparison,” Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 1992 pp. 81-89 (2007).

14 Id.

15 Shaheen, Susan, Adam P. Cohen, and Martin, Elliot, “Carsharing Parking Policy: Review of North American Practices and San Francisco, California, Bay Area Case Study,” Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2187 (2011).

16 Id.

17 Bieszczat, Alice, Schwieterman, Joe, “My Car, Your Car,” Magazine of the American Planning As- sociation pp. 37-40 (May/June 2012).

18 SFMTA. Draft Car Sharing Policy and Pilot Project. January 31, 2013 (Unpublished, on file with author).

19 “San Francisco Begins On-Street Car Sharing Pilot: 11 On-Street Spaces to be Tested During Six-Month Pilot Starting Today,” San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority Press Release (3 Oct. 2011),http://www.sfmta.com/cms/apress/SanFranciscoBeginsOn-streetCarSharingPil…streetspacestobetestedduringsix-monthpil.htm.

20 Shaheen, Susan, Adam P. Cohen, and Martin, Elliot. “Carsharing Parking Policy: Review of North American Practices and San Francisco, California, Bay Area Case Study,” Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2187 (2011).

21 Cervero, Robert, “TOD and Carsharing: A Natural Marriage,” ACCESS, Vol 35 P. 28 (Fall 2009).

22 San Francisco Planning Code Section 166(d)(1).

23 San Francisco Ordinance 286-10. Available at: http://www.sfbos.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/bdsupvrs/ordinances10/o0286-10.pdf.

24 “Reforming Parking Policies to Support Smart Growth,” Metropolitan Transportation Commis- sion (June 2007), http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/smart_growth/parking/parking_seminar/Tool… Handbook.pdf.

25 Bieszczat, Alice, Schwieterman, Joe, “My Car, Your Car,” Magazine of the American Planning As- sociation pp. 37-40 (May/June 2012).

26 Bieszczat, Alice and Joseph Schwieterman, “Are Taxes on Car-Sharing Too High? A Review of the Public Benefits and Tax Burden of an Expanding Transportation Sector,” Chaddick Institute for Metro- politan Development, DePaul University (28 June 2011).

27 Id.

28 Id.

29 Id.

30 Poole Jr., Robert W. “Introducing Congestion Pricing on a New Toll Road.” Transportation, Vol. 19, Issue 4 (1992).

31 Kilborn, Peter T, “To Commute to Washington, the Early Bird Gets ‘Slugs’,” New York Times (29 April 2003),http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/29/us/to-commute-to-capital-early-bird-ge…. html.

32 See: “Guaranteed Ride Home,” MetroTransit, https://www.metrotransit.org/guaranteed-ride- home.aspx.

33 See: “Guaranteed Ride Home,” Georgia Commute Options, http://www.gacommuteoptions.com/ Commuter-Services/Make-It-Easier/Resources-Ridematching-Guaranteed-Ride-Home-and-Transit- Route-Info/Guaranteed-Ride-Home.

34 See: “Guaranteed Ride Home,” Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, http://www. mwcog.org/commuter2/commuter/grh/index.html.

35 See: “Guaranteed Ride Home,” Department of Transportation & Environmental Services, http:// alexandriava.gov/localmotion/info/default.aspx?id=11138.

36 See: “Guaranteed Ride Home,” LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, http://www. metro.net/about/commute-services/guaranteed-ride-home/.

37 Royal, Dawn and Darby Miller-Steiger, “National Survey of Bicyclist and Pedestrian Attitudes and Behavior,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Aug. 2008), http://www.nhtsa.gov/Driving+Safety/Research+&+Evaluation/National+Survey+of+Bicyclist+and+Pedestrian+Attitudes+and +Behavior.

38 “Bikesharing,” University of California, Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center,http://tsrc.berkeley.edu/bikesharing.

39 Shaheen, Susan, “What Makes Bikesharing Successful: Lessons Learned,” Presentation at LA Metro Bikesharing Workshop, Los Angeles, California (Dec. 2011). Available at: http://www.tsrc.berke-ley.edu/presentations.

40 Id.

41 Id.

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