Sustainable Transportation & Design Thinking
When it comes to Sustainable Transportation one has to bring in "design thinking" & "destructive thinking".
Design Thinking is fulfilling an "unmet need" and this has been used by marketing experts and they called it "niche market" giving people what they want.
Destructive Thinking is staff telling the boss what to do instead of the boss telling the staff what to do.
People want "personal transport", which means they want freedom of travel, they want their own space, they want to travel alone, they want to travel whenever they want, they want to choose their travel time, they do want to wait at bus stops or train platforms, they do not want to be dominated by time tables or schedules or routes, they want continuous travel, they hate it when the bus or train stops to drop or pick up passengers, they want to travel fast, they get repulsive feelings when certain types of people come & sit next to them, they do not want to share their space, they want door-step delivery and all this freedom they get from the personal car, now which they do not want to give up and so now have to pay higher fuel prices and have to waste time & fuel in traffic congestion and risk accidents.
"Design thinking" will mean giving the people "Personal Sustainable Transportation" which has all the advantage of a Personal Car and all the advantages of a Public Transport without the disadvantages of either.
"Destructive Thinking" will allow for new innovations to come up. The bus, the train, the car, are all inventions of the 20th century, and all these inventions depended on cheap fuel. Now cost & availablity of fuel and health hazards due the combustion of these fuel are critical issues. Also people need to travel more than before and more people are travelling than before and more people are having cars and more people are travelling longer and more parking spaces are needed, all of these will not be solved by fuel efficient buses.
A revolutionary idea is needed. Fuel efficient buses, metro trains, monorail are a short term solution. A quantum leap in technology is needed.
Most people when they talk of mass transit they think only in terms of buses or metro trains and they do not think in terms of PRT. Transit involving buses (BRTS) & trains are very expensive to set up & operate and they waste a lot of agricultural land and also use up a lot of energy. Once the transit is commissioned people complain about the high cost, high fares, poor frequency, overcrowding, bad choice of routes, multi modal transfers, time wasted, breakdowns, workers strikes, which we hear all the time and the operator complaining about poor ridership and demands subsidy (Sydney monorail).
