On April 16th, 2011 the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum hosted an event exploring entrepreneurial opportunities in the transportation sector. Experts from academia, public programs, non-profits, private business, entrepreneurs, and the government were all represented. The day was intended to provoke discussions relating to open problems in transportation.
I was motivated to attend the conference to learn a little bit more about the transportation industry. I wanted to learn what the hot topics were and I wanted to learn how people were solving transportation problems. At the conference, I wanted to find out who is the architect of our automobile networks, and what principles guide their design choices. Although I did not accomplish this, I did learn a great deal.
Over the course of the day I noticed two main recurring themes. One was the 'first mile, last mile' problem. The issue is that people would use greener transportation, if only it picked them up from their doorstep. Usually, the journey to the green transportation hub was too physically demanding, too dangerous, or just took too long. The second recurring theme was the design of group transportation systems. These systems were either single or multi-passenger and usually they had fixed routes. The day was focused on ways to funnel travelers through 'green arteries' - and finding ways to attract travelers to their transportation hubs.
There was little focus on our existing automobile network. Virtually no discussion focused on electric cars. Throughout the talks congestion was identified as 'hard problem' to solve or simply as an unsolvable problem not worth considering. All the approaches considered were attempting to alleviate traffic by reducing a transportation consumer's need for a car.
It surprised me was that no one even attempted to tackle the question of congestion. No speaker or panelist provided the slightest amount of insight to the problem. No presentation was directed towards efforts to alleviate congestion. The general consensus was that congestion was there no matter what we did about it. Now, this may be that the sample of panelists and experts did not represent the full body of people interested in the transportation design field.
While at least one speaker had a global view of how to improve the transportation system. Most speakers and panelists were vary narrow in their scope. Instead of attacking the problem of congestion - the panelists tackled all kinds of workarounds. This included various types of group transportation schemes, autonomous personal rapid transit systems, or perhaps better city planning to reduce the need to move people at all. This was especially frustrating to me, since my motivation for attending the conference was to learn about the work that is being done to address the issue of congestion directly.
All was not lost. Instead of learning about studies presenting current research on traffic congestion - I was inspired to tackle a number of interesting open questions.
1. Multi Modal Transportation Route Planning
This topic was elaborated upon at length by the speaker with a global transportation system vision.
The focus was on 'multi-modal' transportation system design. A 'multi-modal' system is where a traffic consumer can employ several different means of transport over a single trip. Each trip, depending on the consumers needs - including price, transit time, origin, and destination - should be optimized by combining a variety of transportation modes. The audience was encouraged to "think about the entire journey," that a transportation system should be a "seamless network," and should employ "systems thinking." This advice resonates with my intended approach.
The universal perception is that a consumer cannot independently determine their best option. When a transportation consumer faces a situation where they have a) several possible routes and b) several possible 'modes' of transport - how does the consumer make a decision? Additionally, how does the consumer discover what 'modes' of transportation are potential options? How does a consumer craft the optimal route for each trip?
2. 710 to 210 Expansion
Can you quantitatively demonstrate / prove that the 210-710 connection is needed?
3. Pick Me Up
Carpooling is plagued with inefficiencies and with rigid constraints. A carpool group must be scheduled and its members and its route must be well defined. This does not allow for the use of carpooling in a spontaneous transportation model. How can a spontaneous traveler determine 'who is going my way?' or 'who can pick me up'?
4. Dangerous Driving
Is there a way to make traffic less dangerous? Can you identify indicators of dangerous driving or dangerous traffic conditions?
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