Shareable: Should Products Be Designed for Sharing?: On the eve of Zipcar’s IPO, with profitability riding on driving down the cost of their fleet of designed to be owned cars, it’s time to ask whether products should be designed to be shared. Zipcar has shown that running a car-sharing business with traditional cars isn’t cheap. […]
An interesting post on “cloudonomics” The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics – GigaOM Many of the ideas are familiar to those who study transportation systems. As noted previously, I have been thinking about “cloud commuting”, we should consider what already is a “cloud” in transportation, and that is the network. The network is provided not by […]
I used the Zipcar for the 3rd time this morning. The second time was a week ago. We had a problem, the zipcard could not unlock the zipcar (Element Estelle) (all cars are alliteratively named for their models. Fortunately when I called, they were able to unlock the adjacent car for me (Matrix McKenna), which […]
Prior to leaving for London we sold our second car to cash up for the trip. On return, we had two children, two drivers and one car. As I usually walk to work, this is normally fine, but on occassion one has offsite meetings. For this Zipcar and other car sharing programs offer an alternative. […]
I rented a Toyota Corolla with a local “carsharing” operator GoGet on Saturday. This was for the sole purpose of driving on the wrong side of the road. I figured it was time to get some behind the wheel experience, with no family members sharing the car with me. I managed to live in London […]
Kevin Krizek and I wrote New Streets for North America’s Cities for Public Sector Digest July 2016 issue (paywall), based in part on The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport. Here it is in full New streets for North America’s cities Cities have always been about connectivity—connecting people to jobs, friends, cultures, and […]
CTS Conversations reports Symposium on the Sharing Economy materials available, including the slides from my talk on Mobility-as-a-Service: Did you miss last week’s Symposium on the Sharing Economy? Presentation slides and video recordings from the event are now available! The symposium began with a one-day workshop that brought together researchers from around the globe to discuss […]
Kristina Busch writes in the Minnesota Daily: “Automated cars could be the new norm: A report says car ownership could dwindle over the next few years.” With advancing technology and widely available car-sharing services, getting around without your own car is becoming a reality for big-city dwellers. The need for personal vehicles is dwindling with the […]
What physical goods can—or should—be shared, and what should be owned individually? As the answer to that question slowly changes, the direction of our transportation future is changing, too. “For physical goods, one person’s use prevents someone else’s use, but many physical objects are not fully utilized by their owners,” says David Levinson, a professor […]
Recently published Research Report Levinson,David M , Adam Boies, Jason Cao, Yingling Fan (2016) The Transportation Futures Project: Planning for Technology Change, Report no. MnDOT 2016-02. The Executive Summary is reproduced below. Executive Summary The next two decades will see more change in the transportation sector than have been seen in 100 years. The introduction of […]
David Levinson, Transportist 