Both
Dean Kamen and
Dan Sturges approach transportation technology as a bridge to a different kind of future.
Sturges worked briefly as a car designer at
General Motors before starting his own company with a new class of mini-cars known as
Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs). The company went bankrupt, but you might have seen Sturges’ design lately under the name
Gem, now sold under a
Chrysler subsidiary.
Kamen is in the
Inventors Hall of Fame and holds more than 500 patents, according to Jean Jennings, editor of
Automobile Magazine in Ann Arbor—including the insulin injection system for diabetics and the cool (if not yet widely embraced)
Segway Personal Transporter.
The two spoke together at the recent
Creative Cities 2.0 Summit in Detroit, focusing on the role of transportation in urban revitalization.
Transport and the City“The one thing that threatens the survival of cities is our transportation system,” Kamen told the roomful of leaders, advocates and planners in Detroit. “Cities have survived for thousands of years. They survived the
bubonic plague.”
But the threat represented by our current transportation system is different, says Kamen, because it was built to ensure that everybody could leave the city.
“The goal in life was to get out of the city,” he says of the country’s auto-based transportation push. “It worked.” Eyeing the group, he laments: “You’re like a bunch of orphans who killed your parents and now you want sympathy.”
The average speed of a car in America’s cities is three miles an hour, Kamen says. “No one likes to drive cars in a downtown, congested city anyway—not even the people who build them.”
The problem isn’t one of transportation technology, Kamen suggests. It’s just that we keep using the same technology to meet all our transportation needs.
He uses air travel as an example, pointing out that we don’t fly to Seattle and then maneuver the jet plane to our final destination in town. “It’s beautifully optimized machine to do its job,” he says, but suggests that know it's best to “leave the airplane at the airport.”
The same thinking, he says, should apply to the automobile.
It’s a beautifully optimized machine for certain travel. But Kamen suggests that for cities—particularly for destinations closer than about six miles—there are much better alternatives.
“We’ve crippled [our cities] by putting a bull in the china shop and expecting it to be polite,” says Kamen. “We want to make cities attractive, and get businesses, and make them clean and sustainable—none of the goals of putting cars in our cities are consistent with that.”
“Make your cities attractive and fun. Think big thoughts,” Kamen admonishes. “It’s not a lack of technology; it’s a lack of vision and willingness to give up the past.”
Nobility of MobilityCars “become urban furniture under the ownership model,” agrees Sturges: big, pricey things that just sit around most all of the time, taking up valuable space and getting in our way.
Sturges now leads
Intrago—a start-up that melds Web connectivity with available-on-demand electric vehicles.
He calculates that automobile ownership costs us each of us an average of $23 a day—$46 a day if you have two cars at home.
“If you think your cell phone bill is high, just imagine marking your calendar with that bill every day,” he says. “$46, $46, $46. . . .”
For Sturges, the question is simple: “How do we solve our overall transportation issue?”
So far, it appears, the answers coming from Detroit have been too narrow.
Even “if everyone is in a [plug-in hybrid electric]
Chevy Volt, you still have congestion,” he says. “You still have machines built for five people carrying only one, always carrying only 20 percent of their load capacity."
"We [still] have one car for all jobs.”
The altenrative, suggests Sturges, is offering multiple transportation tools on a need-to-use basis.
He calls it micro-rental: a stable of small, on-demand vehicles—electric bicycles and scooters, NEVs, carsharing options like
Zip Car—throughout a city, connected to the Web and integrating you with mass transit and the ever-present option of (gasp!) walking.
That way, using your PDA, you can always rent the right vehicle for the distance, just when you need it—and the things don’t sit around and suck up your money and space when you don’t.
“We’re talking about different vehicles for different trips—the right tool for the job,” he says.
The idea is starting to catch on. Sturges' pilot projects using this approach to close the “last mile” gap to mass transit earned Sturges some
YouTube notoriety out west.
And
Ingham County Treasurer Eric Schertzing is trying to figure out ways to make transportation central to Lansing’s neighborhood revitalization discussion.
“At least in my experience, the trap is that transportation is an undisclosed topic when you look at neighborhood redevelopment,” says Schertzing who attended the transportation session in Detroit. “This is just a tremendous opportunity for us to recognize the strengths and build on them.”
Transportation TransformationThis won't happen overnight. Kamen and Sturges are not thinking of the transportation end game; they’re designing for the next game—the transformative piece that frees us—at least mentally—from our fixation on the one-hammer-for-all-nails world of the full-size automobile.
But it’s not only about mobility; it’s also about energy. According to a
recent article in CNN’s Business 2.0 magazine, Kamen has spent more than $40 million developing a clean-burning
Stirling engine that can tap fuel sources from gasoline to restaurant grease.
He’s working on putting one into a small, electric car called the
Think City—described as a “rolling iPod”—extending its range and hopefully jumpstarting a
distributed network of mobile home-based power stations.
(Intrigued by the idea of an electric car in your garage, charging up at off-peak times and sending electricity back onto the grid during periods of high demand? See more at the upcoming
Techknow Forum.)
"If you have enough Thinks out there, you would literally change the architecture of the grid," Kamen told Business 2.0 in 2007.
“Society doesn’t like to change,” Kamen says simply. “No industry has grown as big as autos. It’s going to take a long time to change.”
But for both innovators, it’s fundamentally about “finding some acceptable transition to go from the old thing to the new thing,” says Kamen; it’s about getting to point we “stop thinking about a 22-foot long, 3,000 pound vehicle as the only option for the very common distances.”
“The car created the urban form we’re dealing with—it was a transformative technology,” says Sturges. “In the digital age, we can do that again.”
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Brad Garmon is editor-in-chief of Capital Gains and enjoys the technological wonder of hooking his bike to the front of
CATA buses—yes, it’s as fun as it sounds.
Dean Kamen is founder of
DEKA Research & Development Corporation and
FIRST, an organization and robotics competition dedicated to motivating the next generation to use science and technology.
Dan Sturges serves on the national
Transportation Research Board and works with the international design house,
frogdesign. He leads
Intrago, a transportation start-up company in Boulder, Colorado.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of
Trumpie Photography.
Photos:
Neighborhood Electric Vehicle
Urban traffic congestion
Dan Sturges (rt) teaches Segway handling
Segway travel in London
Segway Photographs © The Movement Design Bureau
Other photographs Big Stock Photos.com