Your car as personal roller coaster? Ideas for fixing your morning commute

Where is the future of driving headed? After many decades of business as usual, rapid advances in technology are poised to alter our relationships with our vehicles. Moore’s Law marches on, making computing hardware ever cheaper and more powerful, and it’s also making it small enough and rugged enough to survive being embedded in our vehicles. In Silicon Valley and elsewhere, research labs belonging to established technology players like Nvidia and Google, and automakers like Nissan, Daimler, Ford, and many others are hard at work on fully and semi-autonomous vehicles that will communicate with each other and our infrastructure in order to make driving safer and more efficient. Our cars might be about to get much smarter, but is that enough? Or is this new field of automotive technology moving faster than our roads, or even our societies, are equipped to handle?

The main problem (and therefore the target of those vehicle-to-something (V2X) solutions) is congestion: too many cars on the roads at the same time, all trying to get to the same places. Congestion is unquestionably a bad thing. On a personal level, sitting in traffic jams is a waste of time and money. Worse yet, those jams are actively harmful to our entire planet. We can ill-afford to burn hydrocarbons even for good reasons these days—atmospheric CO₂ levels over the northern hemisphere are now topping 400ppm each summer, levels that haven’t been seen on Earth for more than a million years. Burning hydrocarbons for no good reason, by idling in traffic jams, is just plain bad.

Audi, among others, has been thinking about this for a while as well. The German car company has been holding a biennial competition, the Audi Urban Future Initiative, to stimulate new ideas for transportation in the cities of the 21st century, and last month, the four teams involved presented their ideas in a “science slam,” each getting 10 minutes to wow an audience in Audi’s hometown of Ingolstadt, Germany. This year’s entrants thought about the problems through the lenses of four different cities (Berlin, Boston, Seoul, and Mexico City), with some intriguing ideas emerging.

Somerville, Massachusetts.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Somerville, Massachusetts. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Boston’s 4M concept.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Boston’s 4M concept. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Somerville, Massachusetts. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Boston’s 4M concept. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Two of the teams—Boston and Mexico City—want to use data to empower individuals, urban planners, and entrepreneurs to make better transportation choices. The Bostonians focused on the city of Somerville, a fast-growing suburb of Boston. As the only US-focused team, they highlighted some eye-opening statistics about America’s land use, citing the fact that half of the land in US cities is devoted to cars—not just because of parking lots and garages, but much-wider road lanes than everywhere else.

Its proposal was the alliterative MultiMedia Mobility Marketplace, or 4M; a centralized open database that everyone could use to create a coordinated approach to urban planning. Boston’s team claimed that without using a coordinated data approach to urban planning, between 2014 and 2021 there would be four percent more land devoted to cars, 15 percent more people, 20 percent more CO₂ emissions, and 40 percent more traffic. With their 4M system, they predicted 11 percent less land devoted to cars, despite a 29 percent growth in population, as well as a decrease in CO₂ of 15 percent and a similar drop in traffic.

Team Mexico’s proposal involves mining mobility data from geolocated tweets.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Mexico’s proposal involves mining mobility data from geolocated tweets. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Mexico City may have the honor of being the most congested city on Earth.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Mexico City may have the honor of being the most congested city on Earth. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Mexico’s proposal involves mining mobility data from geolocated tweets. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Mexico City may have the honor of being the most congested city on Earth. Audi Urban Future Initiative

The Mexican team also wanted to create better data to challenge permanent traffic congestion. Mexico City is a true mega city, with a population of 20 million people. It also has the honor of being one of the worst places for traffic on the planet—In 2011 IBM honored it as the most congested city on Earth, with nine million cars. Its proposal involved people donating data about their travel patterns via mobile apps, citing pilot attempts that have collected both structured data (where people report where they commute to and from) and also less-structured (looking at geolocated tweets and following where else those users are tweeting from) which lets them cheaply infer mobility patterns without officially surveying people.

Neither of these approaches seems particularly groundbreaking, and we’ve reported on collaborative and crowdsourced projects to deal with congestion in recent years. The presentations from teams Berlin and Seoul did more to pique my curiosity.

The German team was composed of an urban planner, an inventor (of elevator destination controls), and a neuroscientist and biomimicry expert, who looked at how to connect a new technology park on the outskirts of Berlin with the city. The science slam presentation focused on the parallels that we can draw from nature, illustrated by comparing the road layouts of Berlin and London with the connections between neurons. These involve very different scales, obviously, but there are remarkable similarities between the shapes of the networks they form. Another example of biomimicry given was Japan’s Shinkansen bullet trains. These very high-speed trains used to create loud bangs when they left tunnels at high speed, due to air compression, something that people who lived near these tunnels weren’t particularly enamored with. The engineer tasked with solving this problem happened to be something of a bird watcher and drew on this experience to borrow a shape from the kingfisher beak that allows these birds to dive into water without splashing (the beak shape helps transit from a low-density medium to a high-density medium without creating a large shockwave).

Team Berlin’s concept involved connecting a new tech hub at a former airport with the rest of the city.

Team Berlin’s concept involved connecting a new tech hub at a former airport with the rest of the city.

Team Berlin also crowdsourced their data, this time from FourSquare.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Berlin also crowdsourced their data, this time from FourSquare. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Berlin took inspiration from the way kinesins move proteins around our cells.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Berlin took inspiration from the way kinesins move proteins around our cells. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Berlin also crowdsourced their data, this time from FourSquare. Audi Urban Future Initiative

Team Berlin took inspiration from the way kinesins move proteins around our cells. Audi Urban Future Initiative

In the future, our vehicle cabins may be decoupled from their propulsive units.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Decoupled vehicles could travel vertically as well as horizontally.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Berlin’s plan took inspiration from the microscopic transport networks within our cells that move proteins around. In this system, the “cargo” gets moved by proteins called kinesins that travel along structures called microtubules. The kinesins can be coupled and decoupled from their cargo, and team Berlin’s idea, therefore, is to decouple the passenger cabin of future cars from the bits that handle propulsion. It also wanted to take a leaf from the way ants communicate with pheromone trails that reinforce with lots of traffic, replacing the ant pheromones with data culled from Foursquare.