Urban Mobility Design

Selby Coxon,Robbie Napper,Mark Richardson

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128150399
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Transport et navigation

Focusing from the perspective of the user, Urban Mobility Design investigates how designed mobility and design processes can respond to and drive the emerging social and technological disruptions in the passenger transport sector.

Profound technological advances are changing the mobility expectations of city populations around the world. Transportation design is an under represented research area of urban transportation planning. Urban Mobility Design addresses this gap, providing research-based analysis on current and future needs of urban transportation passengers. The book examines mobility from a uniquely multidisciplinary perspective, involving a variety of innovative design and transportation planning approaches.

• Examines urban mobility from a new perspective
• Coherently combines current research and practice in transport design, technology, mobility, user behaviour experience, and cultural analysis
• Utilizes hands-on experiences with transportation manufacturers, transit operators and engineers to bring a practical view on today's mobility challenges
• Shows how design approaches to problem solving can influence travel behaviour and improve passenger experience

Chapter 1

Introduction – Urban Mobility Design

Abstract

Profound changes in society, such as types of energy, city densification, automated technology and progressive social inclusion, are impacting upon the traditional forms of urban mobility. Much existing land transport infrastructure – trains, buses, personal transport – is predicated upon old frameworks and patterns of use, such as cars facilitating suburban sprawl, vehicular shapes and forms built around the internal combustion engine, inaccessible public transport to persons of reduced mobility and transport planning dogma that sees moving from one place to another as a ‘dis-utility’. While Design has always been a key arbiter of the visual expression of mobility, especially in the automotive industry as a driver of style and personal aspiration, public transport on the other hand has for the much part been hitherto relegated to dry unappealing bland functionality. The book takes the reader through the emerging landscape of urban mobility design and examines how design is addressing the issues surrounding driverless vehicles, share systems, universal access, ubiquitous information and user experience among other ‘disrupters’. This work reflects current research but also sets the agenda for future speculations in the field.

Keywords

Design; Mobility; Urban; Disruptors

Chapter Outline

• Genesis
• New Technology and New Form
• Autonomy
• Accessibility
• User Experience
• New Ways of Making
• Creating the Future of Mobility
• References
• Further Reading

On a typical day, among the thousands of commuters in Melbourne, Australia, there are three co-workers heading towards the same office. Their destination is as common as their journeys are different. The first rises early for a fast rail journey into Melbourne from a regional city more than 100 km away. This commute involves walking, regional and metro rail and bus. The second walks a very short distance from an inner-city apartment to a busy railway station, boarding one of the frequent services there for a journey of around 10 km, and alights only 15 min later. At around the same time, our third colleague gets astride a bicycle in one of Melbourne's suburbs for a 23-km bike ride to the front door of the building. In the process of getting to work, these three commuters, your authors, have very different mobility experiences. These journeys have been planned and orchestrated by them and guided by the intentions of professional transport planning. However, the experiences of their particular journeys have been formed by the objects and landscapes, the physical interactions with the objects of conveyance, comfort, amenity, activity and even their appetites for human contact. The very design of trains, bikes, buses and their infrastructure shape passenger experience, be it pleasant or otherwise.

The ability of your three authors to make their journeys in the first place is founded in the principles of transport planning. Integrating a variety of different disciplines around the goal of keeping everyone moving, transport planning responds to a system of inputs and outputs. However, people are also emotional, habitual beings with feelings shaped by an accumulated life experience that is constantly unfolding. Design is the detail that taps into human motivations and aspirations while people are on their journeys. It is a quality that engenders happiness and delight, as well as alienation and aggression if done badly. Design is cultural, marking out identity and community. It is the lifeblood of the transport system, influencing human behaviours and guiding travel demand. In this book, our three commuters examine the key mobility issues of our time through the lens of design. Clearly, while engineering plays a role in the provision of mobility, it is a necessary yet not sufficient endeavour if we are seeking an ideal state. We assert that there are necessary and sufficient elements that need to exist to create good mobility. Many of the major mobility challenges that confront us will only be met if both the necessary elements that engineering bring are teamed with the sufficient ones of design. By design we mean design approaches in both thinking skills and physical embodiment.

Billions of people all over the globe every day in pursuit of their livelihood, shopping, education or leisure, among many more reasons, either enjoy or despair in the manner of their getting anywhere. Our ability to overcome the limitations of our spatial and temporal boundaries has been a triumph of human ingenuity. Most of what we take for granted as mobility, beyond human and animal muscle, has only arisen in the last two centuries. Technologies emerge, reach maturity and are refined through increasingly nuanced and sophisticated design. Design goes beyond the object and embraces the wider mobility sphere, from the traditional base of designing vehicles to now designing whole experiences.

It is this position – the ability of design to shape mobility – that this book describes. The word design is used here to describe a broad family of processes applied in various ways to various tasks. Design can be used to figure something out, as a mindset for research and as an applied tool used to create things that respond to the physical and cultural worlds we find ourselves in. Design is not a single methodology but, rather, a family of them, providing ways of carrying out activities towards some end goal. It is particularly useful if such a goal is unknown or elusive; indeed, often we see design's agency in bringing together other disciplines in a cohesive effort or in solving a wicked problem. In this book we advocate that design is the appropriate tool to bring together knowledge in order to answer some of mobility's thorny questions. How, for example, will the philosophy of designing desire into cars change in a transport economy that is driverless and shared? In a driverless future, what will intersections look like if we no longer need traffic lights? How will our experience of commuting change when we gain the ability to be productive in transit rather than passively staring out of the window? Are we moving from a view of time in transit as a disutility to it becoming an amenity? This narrative examines the contemporary disruptors that are changing the mobility landscape, from emerging sources of motive power to the connectivity that is leading us to driverless roads, accessible and age-friendly cities where passenger experiences are in the ascendancy, all built in a completely new post-industrial world. In all these spaces, design is the mediator and interpreter between people and the manner in which they travel (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1 The position of design in emergent technology.

Genesis

As a starting point, let us consider where mobility as we know it today may have come from. At the turn of the 19th century, most people did not live in cities. The wider population was engaged in agrarian employment and would not have expected to travel far beyond the homes in which they were born; indeed, most populations lived and died in the same vicinity (Newby, 1987). The only way to get around on land was by foot or hoof. Walking underpins mobility in many ways. In a historical sense, walking and running were the entire scope of mobility for many thousands of years. In a contemporary setting, walking is still the most appropriate mode for the majority of journeys, and the myriad staircases, ramps, tunnels and signposts evidence how walking fills in the gaps between the more complex human inventions that enable mobility beyond our body. The choice to walk is a ‘design’: the agency of the individual. To walk is to be engaged with our surroundings and to participate in those surroundings in a very direct way. As the scene gradually shifts and our perspective reveals new sights, smells and sounds, we are engaging with the very essence of mobility – experiencing the space between our origin and our destination to the fullest extent possible (Jacks, 2006).

What motivation might have existed during the genesis of mechanically aided mobility? For a nomadic culture, mobility would be a concept so ingrained as to be invisible. To be nomadic is to facilitate survival in the context of what is available from the ecosystem; when food is scarce, move on to where it is not. The evolution and development of an agrarian society gradually gave rise to the notion of a largely sedentary community. The movement of people became more predicated upon the movement of goods for trade. Trade then can tell us about certain aspects of the desire for mobility: if we move more goods, or move them faster or further, than our neighbour, an advantage may be had.

The horse has been the pre-eminent beast of burden and primary facilitator of mobility for millennia. Even in the mechanised age, the horse remains in harness for a variety of continuing roles for which it hasn’t been bettered. The animal is strong, agile (as a quadruped, it can scramble over very rough terrain) and has great endurance. Most importantly, it can be domesticated and can socialise, forming companionship with other animals and humans. Horses have a number of useful cognitive abilities too, such as spatial discrimination, memory, levels of operant conditioning, and positive and negative reinforcement, all meaning that they can be trained, and as herbivores they are relatively easy to fuel (Chamberlin, 2006).

The horse had some competition from humans in some forms of transportation. The sedan chair – the name remains with us today in the description of a particular physical arrangement of car – was a means of carrying a single passenger. Porters would lift the passenger up between two carrying poles onto their shoulders via a yoke to transfer the load. In Asia, similar human-powered offerings manifested themselves as the rickshaw. In this instance, the passenger accommodation later became supported by wheels, thereby relieving the porters of much of the direct load and enabling them to channel their exertions better into forward motion.

Individuals could make more of the effort exerted by perambulation by putting their walking motion directly to rotating wheels, and so forms of the bicycle emerged. Slower but far less potentially troublesome than a living creature, the bicycle as we know it today emerged into its resolved form quite rapidly and hasn’t changed a great deal since. The rear-wheel-drive safety bicycle – or bike – opened up the countryside and, with that, the prospect of visiting neighbouring towns and returning all on the same day (Ambrose, 2013). The replacement of horses as the primary means of motive power, at least for heavy lifting, came with the emergence of the steam engine at the end of the 18th century. Performance comparisons between horses and engines led to the idea of measuring steam power in terms of how many horses could perform the same task. This helped market the idea of steam, since it could be more readily understood beside a known quantity. Early steam engine customers might commission an engine to match the output of their best and strongest horse. So, this 18th century measure – weight multiplied by distance divided by time – has endured as the archaic sounding unit of power, although now mostly replaced in metric form by the watt, appropriately named after James Watt, the inventor of steam power.

The steady movement away from an agrarian and rural society to an industrial and urban one from the late 18th century onwards was central to the evolution of mobility. The Industrial Revolution heralded major changes in society impacting upon almost every aspect of human experience. The shift from handmade cottage manufacture to mass production had extraordinary consequences upon the economy and society. A significant driver of this change was the ability to create rotary and reciprocating motion automatically and with power an order of magnitude greater than that possible with animals. Steam energy produced a lot of power in relation to its weight. The pressures created to produce steam power could be contained by advances in iron making, one of which was the ability to smelt the metal at high temperatures with coke-coal rather than expensive charcoal. All of this was ideal for creating a new form of engine. Guiding this engine along in terms of direction, while overcoming terrain and friction, was done by adapting a long-used mining technique of removing coal and spoil by rolling wheels over rails. In combining the two, Richard Trevithick invented the first moving steam engine or locomotive – meaning ‘place in motion’, which distinguished it from other, more stationary engines. Its eventual effect was as profound to that century as the internet was at the end of the 20th century.

In a similar fashion to the sedan chair, the form language of the locomotive was initially governed by physical necessities. As the engineering of the locomotive matured, a dominant form language emerged of the elongated boiler, firebox, cab and tender. Like all feats of engineering before and since, there was a remarkable beauty in the purity of this form for purpose. Before the emergence of industrial design as a profession, the early engineer was more successful if equipped with a sensitivity to form, materials and appearance. A natural beauty emerged as the best engineers of their kind also exercised the role of gestalt ingenieur: negotiating the laws of physics with an eye for the notion of aesthetics.

The maturing of rail technology cemented the place of mobility in culture. The sheer physical achievement of the railways led to the emergence of a culture of triumph. People loved the railways. The locomotive was emblematic of this triumph and manufacturers sought to increase its aura. The emergence of streamlining as a style, and indeed the emergence of styling itself as a rational and valuable undertaking, is well illustrated by Raymond Loewy's work on the locomotives of the Pennsylvania Rail...