Chapter 11 - The Media Laboratory City Car: A New Approach to Sustainable Urban Mobility

Abstract

Strategies for achieving urban energy efficiency frequently focus upon reducing overall transportation demand, and upon shifting demand from automobiles to public transportation. But there is abundant evidence that high levels of interconnectivity are crucial to vibrant, flexible, creative cities; and that the inhabitants of cities greatly value personal mobility, so these traditional strategies have significant downsides. This chapter introduces the Media laboratory city car—a new concept that opens up exciting opportunities for creation of clean and energy-efficient cities for the twenty-first century. The MIT Media laboratory's city car concept proposes extremely convenient, flexible, one-way rental in the context of an electric vehicle, distributed urban energy and mobility system. It is an urban mobility system that takes advantage of ubiquitous networking and embedded intelligence to enable combination of compact, simple, lightweight, and battery-electric vehicles with ubiquitous recharging infrastructure, and sophisticated electrical grids and markets. It is inherently energy efficient, it makes optimal use of clean, renewable energy sources, it keeps mobility costs low, and it does not compromise convenience or quality. Mobile connectivity can significantly enhance the performance of the system. Unlike traditional taxi dispatching systems that can be hard to contact at peak hours, every vehicle can be equipped with an accurate real-time information system that reports the availability of vehicles and parking spaces throughout the city.