Is the Future of Transport in Niches?

Transport occurs in fairly stable patterns.  People commute to and from work, school and stores each day within a known range of miles and load. However, these stable patterns do not define the vehicles people buy. People tend to buy vehicles which cover a large array of contingencies.  Daily commuter vehicles are more often than not heavier than needed for a daily commute as they are purchased for events such as a once every month journey more than 200 miles with 6 people.  This contingency-link to vehicle purchasing creates a lot of fuel inefficiency.

(source: US Census Bureau)

As transport fuels become more diverse and expensive, powered transportation devices may also become more customized to fill niches.  These niche vehicles will be more efficient as they would just cover the vast majority of daily transport in the most efficienct manner.  Services such as car sharing Zip Car would meet the need for less frequent vehicle uses.

In cities, people tend to use taxis, subways and buses.  Taxis are expensive. Subways and buses, while most often the quickest way around, can be slow and infrequent at the edges of a city.

I was passing a motorcycle store the other day and saw this Ultra Motor A2B electric bicycle which can travel 20 miles at 20 miles per hour between charges.  It is an urban commuting vehicle.  One can pedal if the batteries have been drained.  The vehicle can be stored inside an apartment or an office which is an advantage over gasoline-powered scooters.  I am not endorsing this bike, it is simply interesting that products which would once have been considered gimmicks are now slowly at the edges of becoming more mainstream.

Transport Observations in Asia

Singapore: Yesterday in Singapore I had an interesting chat with a taxi driver. His taxi runs primarily on CNG (compressed natural gas) but it is bi-fuel in that it can run on gasoline also. The driver said that his main beef with CNG is that the city currently only has 3 public refueling stations. The CNG stations are all located in the west of the city and service hundreds of CNG taxis. Refueling with CNG in Singapore can currently take up to 30 minutes if you are unfortunate enough to run into one of the occasional 25 minute waits in line at a station. A fourth refueling station is being built to meet growing demand.

The vast majority of Singaporean taxis run on regular gasoline and not CNG. CNG was introduced to a portion of the Singaporean cab fleet within the past five years. The driver mentioned that the slightly slower acceleration of a CNG vehicle compared to a gasoline vehicle didn't bother him much. Cruising on highways he observes no discernible performance difference. He said that during the oil price increase in 2008, the cost of CNG was lower than that of gasoline, but that now that oil is $50 per barrel he doesn't think there is much of fuel cost difference.

Oil 101 outlines why CNG is suitable for city taxi and mass transit fleets but is not practical to use as a fuel outside of urban areas. The Singaporean experience shows that CNG service station roll outs can be a challenge even for ultra-well managed urban areas.

Vietnam: I am in the scooter capital of the world today: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. Cars are second class vehicles here and I don't see many push bicycles (which is a big change from 10 years ago). I ride a scooter and motorcycle in New York and am familiar with the benefits and hurdles such vehicles face in a city. Scooter owners in Vietnam drive aggressively. You can tell they are used to ruling the road over cars. There is a lot of scooter-pooling. By my estimation over half of the scooters here carry two passengers. It is the rainy season in Vietnam but that doesn't deter scootering. Drivers and passengers sport a vast assortment of ponchos. Beer delivery even takes place, somewhat precariously, on scooters (see the video below I took earlier today).

Vietnam is a still a net oil exporter with very low but rapidly growing per capita oil consumption (approx. 1.5 barrels per person per year compared with around 24 in the US). There is no sense of anyone in Vietnam cutting back on oil consumption as a result of high oil prices and from the level of economic activity here (5%+ yr/yr growth is generally expected in 2009) one doesn't feel we are in the midst of a global recession.

(above: video I took in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam this morning)

Gasoline Taxes - The Future of Transport

(The future for many? A photo I took in 2005 near Jaipur, India)

A Simple Alternative to Gasoline Taxes
The reason I am proposing a Vehicle Efficiency Market is that gasoline taxes are not politically viable in the US. Here is a good summary from the New York Times today of the recent failed attempts by several individual US states to raise gasoline taxes.

The Future of Transportation
At the EIA conference in Washington D.C. earlier this week I thought that one of more thought provoking and entertaining presentations was that given by Lee Schipper (Precourt Institute, Stanford University). Here is a site he posts to.

The reason I thought Schipper's comments were so interesting is that he paints a fairly credible picture of the future of transportation by pulling together images from his travels. In a future where we must do more with less, Schipper envisions a world in which transportation involves many people (even in the developed world) riding motorcycles (as in India/China) rather than cars, bus rapid transit (such as the Metrobus in Mexico City and Bogotá's TransMilenio) and more sidewalks (even along highways) ensuring walkable roads.

At the conference, Schipper also made an observation that one of the primary infrastructure gaps discouraging push bicycle transportation is not a lack of cycling lanes, but that there are few safe places to store cycles at office buildings or rail stations.