Yesterday we presented the first excerpts from a report on the future of transportation:
The Digital Nexus of Post-Automobility, published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Authors are K. Dennis and J. Urry.
Here’s a presentation of this important report, with excerpts on car to car swarming.
Dennis and Urry:
1. Summary:
“In this Report we specifically focus upon the ‘system’ of automobility. In particular, we frame automobility within a cluster of rapid dynamic changes in several key areas that are now transforming geo-physical relations, systems, and policies worldwide. Our central thesis is that these dynamic systemic changes may shift present car automobilities into a post-automobility system in a manner that will transform the car from autonomous to post-car automation.
In this Report the argument is set out in four chapters. Chapter One – Global Systems & Vulnerabilities – establishes the various influential processes and frames how they comprise dynamic and multiple shifts that may affect each other in a systemic manner. Chapter Two – Auto-Assemblages – examines the car system as a hybrid assemblage and outlines the principle processes that may produce a potentially new automobility assemblage, a post-car system. Chapter Three – A Digital Nexus – goes into more detail as to how we envision the ‘car’ assemblage shifting from a series to a nexus. This principally involves intelligent transport systems and related digital developments becoming embedded within networked infrastructures. Finally, Chapter Four – Post-Automobilities – engages with social implications and examines a range of social scenarios that may be necessary for a shift to a post-automobility ‘system’.”
Thus:
“Transport policies for the future are shifting towards providing capacity, safety, security, and data basing. This can be achieved through intelligent network infrastructures that interact with road vehicles and their users. Whilst this may appear as leading down the road to a ‘control society’, it may be an unintended outcome of how these technologies have become enmeshed within social practices. It is presently unclear whether these digital technologies will be used for benefit and gain or as part of clandestine and covert strategies.
Thus, car mobilities may become transformed from a series, or sequential platform that is only loosely connected to a social fabric of people, objects, environments, information, and mobility, into a nexus. This nexus will construct automobility futures into complex assemblages of networked structures, both natural and digital, that will combine individualised and social components into a multiplexing arrangement of interconnectivity and embodied movements. We refer to this as a transition to the digital nexus of post-automobility.”
2. Excerpt on Automobility
“‘Automobility’ is a hybrid assemblage, of humans (drivers, passengers, pedestrians) as well as machines, roads, buildings, signs and entire cultures of mobility with which it is intertwined (Thrift 1996: 282-84). What is key is not the ‘car’ as such but the system of these fluid interconnections since: ‘a car is not a car because of its physicality but because systems of provision and categories of things are “materialized” in a stable form’ that then we might say possesses very distinct affordances (Slater 2001: 6). It is necessary in any consideration of future automobility to frame this discourse within a ‘system assemblage’; a web of material interactions and networks that position the possibility for movement and constitutes an embedded environment that hosts the user. Whilst automobility is a system in which everyone is coerced into an intense flexibility, it also enforces certain relationships of dependence within the temporal, spatial, and geo-physical constraints that it itself generates.”
3. Car to Car Swarming Systems
“These vehicle communication and safety technologies seek to extend beyond the individual car unit to connect with other ‘cars’ in the immediate vicinity, in a car-to-car communication network that forms a nexus that transcends the present car series system. Rather than cars operating in Euclidian geometry, a pre-complexity approach, non-Euclidean mobile spaces will be opened up through networked communications operating in real-time between cars in transit, similar to swarm behaviour. Swarm Intelligence and Traffic Safety , a project under development at CalTech by Yizhen Zhang and Alcherio Martinoli, is based upon complexity notions of how natural systems aggregate . The aim of such safety technology is to take some degree of autonomy away from the driver so that response-reaction times can be quickened under such automation. In other words, the cars take on some of the responsibility in communicating their presence to other cars similarly to how people signal their presence to others within a social context. A new development by a German research project envisions a peer-to-peer network for vehicles on a road passing data back and forth (Ward, 2007). Likewise, the ‘Car 2 Car Communication Consortium’ is a non-profit organisation set-up by several European vehicle manufacturers for researching and developing road traffic safety by means of inter-vehicle communications. Already ‘Audi, BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Fiat, Renault and Volkswagen have formed the Car-2-Car Communications Consortium to seek consensus on standards for dedicated short range communication (DSRC) communication’ (Bell 2006: 148).”
Sources:
* 1. http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/i2010/index_en.htm
* 2. http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/esafety/intelligent_car/index_en.htm
* 3. http://www.cnse.caltech.edu/Research02/reports/zhang1full.html
* 4. http://www.car-to-car.org/
Kevin Carson, via email:
One thing that’s possibly relevant, in the general category of
transportation, is James Womack’s analysis (in Lean Thinking) of the
airline industry as an example of Sloanist “batch-and-queue”
production. Like Sloanist auto production, it tries to minimize unit
costs and maximize ROI on each separate stage of production,
individually, by buying the biggest and most capital-intensive
machines it can and then producing in enormous batches to maximize
utilization of capacity–even though the additional costs of
inventory, waiting, and other waste generated by batch-and-queue
processing outweighs the savings at the point of production.
Traditional manufacturing optimizes individual steps of production at
the expense of pessimizing the overall process.
In mass production manufacturing, this takes the form of mountains of
goods-in-process inventory piled up between the machines, and the
warehouses full of finished goods awaiting orders.
In the airline industry, they think they’re minimizing unit cost by
building the biggest airliners they possibly can, and then trying to
keep them full. But this mandates a hub-and-spoke system that more
than doubles the total number of miles flown, mandates expensive
service infrastructure for handling the human “goods-in-process
inventory” (travellers awaiting switchover), etc.
All things considered, it would be much cheaper overall to use small
planes for point-to-point flights. And when Peak Oil runs its course
and air traffic is 10% or less of its present volume, we’ll probably
wind up with that kind of lean system.