Ford not just selling cars anymore

This article originally appeared at Mobility Lab.

Anyone who caught Ford’s Super Bowl commercial might have some questions about the other modes – bikeshare and vanpool, most notably – that appeared next to the automaker’s cars. To Ford, it’s part of a strategic, ongoing shift.

Speaking Monday at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr., said his company has done one thing really well for the past century – sell cars. But now it’s going to do two things really well – sell cars and provide mobility solutions.

“About 12 years ago, it occurred to me that the way we were doing business wouldn’t hold anymore.” He said many competitors were looking around the world at the potential to sell more cars in developing countries with growing GDPs, but Ford thought that was a terrible growth strategy. “Where are they going to go? You already can’t drive in most urban areas.”

And although it also seems counter-intuitive that Ford would want to make America’s aging transportation systems work better by providing additional options, Ford Jr. alluded to that being a key to the mobility strategy. He didn’t want to discuss the services Ford is going to start offering cities, but he hinted at logistics, fleet management, integrated payments, and autonomous vehicles as areas that make sense. “Watch what we’re doing more than what we’re saying,” he added.

The earliest public parts of what Ford is doing are already starting to take shape. In September, Ford bought shuttle startup Chariot for an eye-popping and a little surprising $65 million. Chariot currently provides 15-seat vans in theBay Area, which run along fixed routes set by rider demand. Ford CEO Mark Fields, recently claimed that, besides offering a complement to transit, each Chariot vehicle likely replaces 20 to 25 vehicles in downtown areas. (Fields, like Ford Jr., has been making the rounds to further publicize the company’s mobility focus.)

This spring, Bay Area Bike Share will become FordGoBike, expanding a shared mobility option that offers another way for more people to get to bus and rail connections.

Surely not all of the experiments under the umbrella of the Ford Smart Mobility division will work. Ford partnered with Bridj, another Chariot-like shuttle, last year in Kansas City, and the year-long pilot program ended in March with few riders. City officials have discussed bringing it back after more fine-tuning.

And Ford is also planning for autonomous vehicles that will work in a fleet-like capacity by 2021.

At SXSW, Ford Jr., said he is confident that the technology for all the ways automobile fleets can complement mass transit have predictable dates to be ready. What he said he can’t predict is when the public will be ready.

Photo: Bill Ford Jr. speaking at SXSW (Twitter.com/exmonkey).

After first test, the Hyperloop still has to convince public it’s a worthy option

This article first appeared at Mobility Lab.

When Mobility Lab and other experts discuss improving transportation connections for people, we often mean within their local areas. A recent test of the Hyperloop, however, suggests we should allocate a bit more time considering how to better connect the entire country.

Think about it, the recent travails of the Metro subway in Washington, D.C., almost seem  idyllic when compared to our options for getting from city to city. Across car travel, Amtrak, and the hassles of flying, a trip from D.C. to New York are all essentially a wash, time-wise.

Footage of the test from CNET.

Enter Elon Musk’s Hyperloop concept. The electromagnetic rail system got a test in the Nevada desert on May 11, marking a first for one of the two firms currently constructing the technology. The system looks to average around 600 miles-an-hour and max out at about 760 mph. If it becomes serviceable, the first line is likely to be Los Angeles to San Francisco. That 383-mile trip would take about 35 minutes, meaning the 226-mile trip from D.C. to New York might run between 20 and 25 minutes.

It sounds like a big improvement, especially if we could connect every city in the country. Businesses and people would flock to the Hyperloop hubs, which could become mass centers of commerce. However, how travelers move outward from those central hubs could be a disaster if primary transit networks aren’t part of the considerations and flexible mass-transit options aren’t lined up.

As entrepreneurs like Musk march toward the science-fiction future that many have imagined for decades, even tougher than creating the technology will be winning the court of public opinion.

Zack Huhn, a startup expert and blogger notes that “every major paradigm shift relating to transportation has been met with great resistance.” He writes:

“The automobile, for example, was disallowed from many city streets because unfamiliar noise startled the horses. When Tesla introduced an effective plan for rolling out electric vehicle infrastructure nationwide, the proposition was ridiculed and essentially disallowed by big auto and oil lobbies. These interests shared an initial lack in public support – including implications such as a lack of public policy influence, and equally as important, a lack of funding or resource allocation from the public and private sectors alike.

“The most important impact from successful Hyperloop testing will be a shift in public opinion not only to become more open to ideas of different and improved means of transportation, but to be more demanding of them.”

We know that people in the U.S. rarely think of adjusting their transportation choices. So could we take the leap from mostly driving in our personal vehicles alone and riding on airplanes right past public transit and Amtrak trains all the way to Hyperloop?

In order for this to happen, public officials and transportation experts will need to focus on:

• Making sure it works with existing transportation systems
• Acquiring land rights and making cross-jurisdictional agreements
• Quantifying how regional economies react, and
• Determining its impact on the environment.

Meanwhile, the public will concern itself with questions like:

• How much will it cost?
• How safe is it?
• How reliable is it? and
• How comfortable will the riding experience be?

Given the unprecedented speeds involved, safety will be a key point for companies to get ahead of and address, as is the case with many new transportation technologies. Think of bikeshare, which has never had a fatality in the U.S., and driverless cars, which have only had one self-caused crash after millions of miles of testing. Once testing grounds prove safe, as long as riders agree to start boarding, over time people begin to think more rationally about their levels of safety.

NASA Ames research psychologist Lee Stone claims the ride will be comfortable and similar to riding a bus, that Hyperloop passengers can “drink a Coke” while traveling at high speeds. Other experts say that Hyperloop companies are planning to make takeoff and slow-downs similar to airplane acceleration levels.

Musk also seems to have the costs worked out so that the Hyperloop would truly be the best intercity option for all income levels. He has claimed that 840 people per hour could be moved between Los Angeles and San Francisco at a ticket price of $20 per passenger. But, not surprisingly, many experts disagree, and some have said that a more realistic single ticket price would be around $1,000.

The ultimate consumer cost – as with many of the specifics for operation – remains a major unanswered question as the Hyperloop moves toward reality.

Photo, top: Hyperloop One’s sled test decelerating (photo from Hyperloop One).

People want to know about what the future of driving looks like

I've been working with my video-in-crime partner Will Chilton for the past couple of years and our latest production is definitely our best. I did a lot of the writing, co-produced it, and narrate it.

And I'm really happy how well it's doing. In its first three days since being released, it's gathered more than 5,000 views on YouTube and Facebook, as well as some nice press coverage in Vox, Inc. Magazine, and others.

To Take Back Our Streets, Remember How We Lost Them to Cars

OPTION OPPORTUNITIES

Storytelling and public relations can take back the real story of American streets that was hoodwinked by auto-industry groups long ago.

This article originally appeared at Mobility Lab.

Children may again someday walk or bike to their schools and their friends’ houses, but to get to that point historian and author Peter Norton says we’ll have to unlearn much of what the auto industry has taught us over the past century.

“Children’s mobility has been neglected. We have seen the future GM and Ford fed us in the 1950s. To change the future, we have to recover versions of the past we have forgotten,” he told an audience this week at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

Norton presented some of the stories from his long-admired book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City to illustrate just how brainwashed we’ve become in regards to how we want to design and move through our public spaces.

“People are pretty smart about how to share space optimally,” he said, noting how pedestrians originally became irritated with cars encroaching on their streets in the 1910s.

In that era, the public blamed drivers for all the child pedestrian deaths, whereas now Norton says we would blame the parents. Even as early as the 1920s, the messages began changing to “keep the kiddies off the streets.” Before autos and the notion of speed were common, kids, pedestrians, horses, bicycles, and others jostled through the streets just fine.

“Democracy, free markets, and American culture did not decree the motor-age city,” Norton said. “Before [auto-industry groups] could build the motor-age city, they had to redefine the city.”

And Norton says they did a tremendous job of it. Streets are now thoroughly car-centric, and the idea of people-centered streets remains a difficult concept for most people to grasp. These groups recognized they needed to shift the perceived cause of collisions away from drivers and onto pedestrians. Under the name Motordom, the interest groups were quoted in a 1922 edition of Engineering News-Record that they would lead the effort in a “revision of our concept of what a city street is for.”

A major part of this effort was to make walking in the street unacceptable, essentially inventing the idea of “jaywalking.” Centrally coordinated from Detroit, Motordom would enlist Boy Scouts there and in other cities to hand out cards to pedestrians to “quit jaywalking” and would hire jaywalking clowns to look like they were hit by a Model T.

Other parts of the successful effort included producing coloring books for kids, complete with language about how streets were designated for cars, and opening a new program at Harvard: teaching the first generation of traffic engineers to prioritize traffic lights for faster driving and more difficult walking.

Ultimately, Norton uses a Wizard of Oz analogy to describe the public’s perception:

“The Emerald City doesn’t solve Dorothy’s problems. It was a bogus utopia. In the book [but not the movie], it was an illusion created by green glasses that Dorothy had to wear to make the city look like emeralds. It was really made of paper mache or something. ‘There’s no place like home,’ and we have to go back to understanding our multimodal past.”

Decades later, we have never gotten the city of easy parking and effortless thoroughfares that the auto industry and its interest groups have promised us again and again, notably at the 1939 Futurama Exhibit of the World’s Fair (pictured at the top). And, Norton adds, while driverless cars would be spatially efficient, would eliminate the process of parking, and could be shared vehicles, we should be cautious in viewing them as providing a promised utopia.

Norton believes storytelling and public relations are the keys to building a future that more accurately incorporates what we have learned from our past. He said a possible blueprint is to make sure messages like “biking is normal,” “walkability,” and “good transportation choices” become better understood and more widely accepted over the next decade.

Top: Ford Motor’s “Road of Tomorrow” from the 1939 World Fair