SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY: THINK MORE, MOVE LESS

摘要

We once hoped that the Internet would replace trips to the mall; that air travel would give way to teleconferencing; and that digital transmission would replace the physical delivery of books and videos. In the event, technology has indeed enabled some of these new kinds of mobility - but in addition to, not as replacements for, the old kinds. Roads built to relieve congestion increase total traffic, and the Internet has increased transport intensity in the economy as a whole. The rhetoric of a "weightless" economy, the "death of distance", and the "displacement of matter by mind" sound ridiculous, in retrospect. The fundamental problem with the car and the plane is not that they burn too much of the wrong kind of fuel. The problem is that they enable, and perpetuate, patterns of land use, transport intensity, and the separation of functions in space and time, that render the whole way we live unsupportable. Rather than tinkering with symptoms - such as inventing hydrogen-powered vehicles, or turning gas stations into battery stations - the more interesting design task is to re-think the way we use time and space. Distributed computing is an inspiration, I believe, because it's the information equivalent of sending the acorn, not the tree. There is an alternative way: reduce the movement of matter - whether goods or people - by changing the word faster, to closer. The speed-obsessed computer world, in which network designers rail against delays measured in milliseconds, are years ahead of the rest of us in rethinking space-time issues.