Capoco teams up with Royal College of Art for mobilicity project:
Scenarios for sustainable public transport in 2025
How will we travel on public transport around large cities in the future? That’s the question which the far-reaching mobilicity project, the results of which were revealed today, set out to answer.
Capoco Design, which designs passenger vehicles for world markets and contributed to the design philosophy of many of Britain’s current generation of city buses, commissioned mobilicity from the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at London’s prestigious Royal College of Art to mark the 25th anniversary of Capoco’s founding by Director Alan Ponsford. The project set out to explore new directions in sustainable mass transit for commuters and residents in the crowded urban environment of 2025 and beyond.
“We’ve considered the key drivers of change for the next 25 years – sustainable development, energy and emissions, access, information technology, integrated systems, safety, social factors and the cityscape itself,” says Ponsford. “I was keen to see if we could make an original statement about the future of mass public transport in the large city environment and I am confident we have.”
Research associate Merih Kunur, an experienced researcher in transport design who holds degrees from Turkey’s Mimar Sinan University and the RCA, began the project by exploring depictions of future multi-layered city transport in popular films. He then developed a research matrix based on three primary fields of investigation (spatial organisation of cities, social change and sustainability).
This matrix was tested and expanded in an expert forum at the RCA at which architects and urban planners, social researchers and sustainable technology and vehicle experts came together to debate a future in which world cities are becoming more polycentric.
Insights from the expert forum informed the development of user scenarios on specific sites in three world cities:
• London: a noon-time business journey from Covent Garden to City Airport by a male executive;
• Hong Kong: a trip by a grandparent through a densely populated shopping district to a main train terminal to meet her grandchildren;
• Istanbul: a long evening commute home across the Bosphorus Bridge by a female office worker.
Each journey was filmed and time inefficiencies and user discomforts analysed. A single vehicle design programme emerged from the analysis.
In each scenario, the travel challenge of making a difficult journey across a city is addressed by a new hybrid-electric vehicle system which delivers zero-emissions in pedestrian zones, is driverless and runs on global satellite guidance sensors to fixed destinations.
The low-floor, easy-access vehicle module comes in three sizes – 16, 20 and 24 passengers – and has a flexible interior that responds to different usage (airport-bound vehicle modules have increased luggage space, for example). The design concept has the ability to form a single train of up to six vehicle units for express journeys and then split apart into smaller modules to enable local access.
When six pods are linked together into a single vehicle, with each pod carrying 24 people, approaching 150 people could be transported - the equivalent of two or three buses or one tram. With no fixed track being required, a versatile network could be developed that, for instance, might be changed to handle day or night traffic. By using the pods separately, the system could provide an almost door-to-door capability, with very short walking distances to stops.
In London, for example, the smaller vehicle units would collect people from around the West End before forming a single train at a given point to head out to City Airport. In Istanbul, the opposite would occur: an express ‘train’ heading out of the city would divide into smaller local services, thus combining express and local services in a single vehicle journey. In Hong Kong, special emphasis could be given to understanding the needs of older travellers.
By combining video footage of specific urban journeys with computer modelling of a new vehicle typology, mobilicity projects a glimpse of a future for city travel that is less frustrating and time-consuming. Says Merih Kunur: “A greater sense of privacy is given to passengers so this approach is socially sustainable as well as environmentally sustainable.”
mobilicity n. 1. ability to move freely and easily around large metropolitan areas. 2. a transport and design project solving the public transport challenges in large cities from 2025 and beyond [L mobilis L civitas]
For further information please contact:
Martin Hayes, Communications Advisor +44 (0) 207 494 8050
Submitted: 07 Oct 2004
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