Mobility Matters Daily #164 - Flying cars, e-scooters, and concrete
With a map I spent far too much time exploring...
Good day my good friend.
After yesterday’s, let’s call it a mishap, it’s back to normal service today. You, me, and a few links curated just for you.
James
Getting flying cars to work is one thing, managing them is another
Managing air traffic is simple in theory. You keep the planes apart horizontally and vertically, with set areas of the sky set aside for different things. This has worked well (largely) ever since we managed air traffic with bits of paper. But airspace is becoming more congested with different types of aircraft conflicting their movements. What’s more, new technologies and air management protocols like NextGen are challenging the traditional, simplistic forms of separation. Then there is flying cars.
Research is starting into the question of how you manage this traffic, particularly in cities. This early paper1 on eVTOL (electric Vertical Take Off and Landing) tests a number of protocols for managing congested airspace in cities. This paper by Wei et al also tested different ideas for energy-efficient sequencing of landings and take-offs in cities. But this is based on a simplistic form of this traffic that is not too dissimilar to helicopters. I look forward to the research that integrates air and road traffic management systems.
E-scooters are popular, it seems
This analysis by Oliver O’Brien in the excellent Zag Daily shows that while there are some notable retractions in e-scooters, people are making a lot of trips in the UK. Around a million a month. That is on just over 18,000 e-scooters across the UK, or if my crude maths is correct, that’s 55 trips per scooter per month. Not quite profitability levels, but that’s a pretty good start.
On a personal level, seeing a trial I spent some time on - Southampton - go from 30 e-scooters to over 1000 e-scooters in the city does fill me with a certain amount of joy. Perhaps there may be some life in this new form of mobility. Although now the operators are demonstrating the tech works and their systems work, the big challenge is making the finance work.
Concrete - the transport emissions problem we never talk about
If one material has built our world, its concrete. Chances are, you are within 100 metres of some right now. Whether you build a new road or a cycle route, you are laying the stuff. But it has a problem. It produces carbon, a lot of it. By some estimates, just making concrete emits nearly as much carbon as all of agriculture.
But there may be life in the old material yet. This comprehensive article in City Monitor does an excellent job of summarising the state of the work being done to reduce the carbon impacts of the material. Notably scientific work being done to make concrete self-healing.
Something interesting
Oh my word I got lost in this for most of this evening. This simple visualisation in the New York Times maps the shadow of every building in New York, by time of year, and how much time it spends in shadow. Go and get lost in the data2, I urge you.
If you do nothing else, then do this…
Read this report from the Centre for Net Zero on the inequalities in electric vehicles in the UK3.
The abstract is free to read, but you will need to pay to access the full article.
You do have to sign up, but it’s free.
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