Transport II

How to find the better combination of transports in our city nowadays? Different possibilities for our city's transport system?

Taking under consideration place in transport, we thought about a transport network where cars are only allowed in the outside of the city, so that we expect people go by one made of transport from the outside of the city to some big parkings arround the city center and there they can either go walking, taking metro or public transport. We ll have to think about which different mades of transport we can use in the outside and where to switch to the public transport.

how having continuous transport ?

what about transports ?
I write here about transports in time : a user wants to go continuously from home to workplace but he can't really because of traffic jam in the morning. Taking the bus or the metro is not a continuous action because people must wait for the bus, but then the tour is continuous. Taking the car allow a personnal tour but is not continuous because of the trafic jam : it's kind of alternative. Use the bike is good if you don't want to go too far. Otherwise it's not really usefull.
Part of the problem we have to solve is to improve the route of someone to make it the most continuous as possible.

How relations can be involved while in the action of getting from one place to another

One might wonder whether “relations” have something to do with transport. Maybe the standard answer is ‘no’, but we will try to let you know that people can change their mind indeed. We will try to figure out how to make transportation go social, because ‘social’ means ‘productive’, and productive means time and money.

So, how are we going to figure it out? We want to make the action of transporting become a passive action, so that people can focus on other actions that can involve, for instance, getting some work done before arriving to the office (which also connects with the “Activity” topic) or having the first meetings in the morning. This way, we think, not only transporting actors (railroad companies, etc.) can create value from that, nowadays, useless period of time, but also all the people who is being transported.

Traffic jams in a big city in the morning

When someone drives a car or rides a bicycle he can't work because he must pay attention to the road.But when someone uses the metro,the train or the bus he can check his emails and get prepared for his job so when he reach his work he can take care of the rest more important subjects

In the performing arts the "Unity of Time, Place and Action", which is attributed to Aristotle even though he did not actually formulate it, is a well-known theatre law of the 19th and 20th centuries.^{note 5} One of the understandings that evolved from the use of digital technologies in the performing arts was their capacity to function as a catalyst in this discourse about the unity of time, place and action. The changing shape of presence was understood in these basic terms, which functioned as an ingredient for composition and orchestration. Some questions that were asked included:

Time: how can one share a rhythm when confronted by time delays between two locations that are connected via technology? How can one orchestrate public shows in two time zones where the feeling of the particular day is very different?

Place: How can one create a 'mise en scene' in which two places are connected? How can people look each other in the eye when mediated via a camera?

Action: Can I dance with you at a distance? How can we share what we create when we are building something while not in the same place?

We will focus on making our transport system:

-Flexible( lot of lines, better frecuence)

-Attractive (encourage people to take public) economic attraction (cheap, different prizes for students or old people, free children)

-Safe for bikes in the centre and pedestrians (avoid run-overs) & environmental care (lots of bikes and electrical buses)

Questions about transport
1. Why not other things while transporting but work?
Sports, static bike (make electricity for few uses), running machines,the problem is you may need showers at your working place. Also take under consideration reading places with newspapers and magazines.
2. To attract people - More comfortable buses/metros, cheap prizes,
kids place in metro, not possible in the bus, with “static games”
3. Rush hour, how you manage work? More buses/metros with better frecuency.
Be able to connect into the net and start working (example: Microsoft US), or in public transport to have some Computers attached so that you put a coin and you get Internet connection.
4. Letting cars to go into the centre in not rush hour.
5. If city grows, how to adapt?
Better to use more buses, its easier to use new buses than building new metro lines, but will have to think about developing our metro line too. A board of people can monitor the growth of the city and plan future extensions.
6. Security issues:
Safety.- we teach the bus drivers they have to take care of the bikes, as we expect lots of bikes movements in the city centre
Security.- same as nowadays.
7. Possibility of poolcars? (full cars) we let them go into the city. Big fines if a car with less than 4 people goes into the city."camaras controlling", a lot of control at the begining so that people take it seriously
8. Buses could:
-either pick children at school and take them all to a playground so that the parents are there already or are about to get there (special buses for children only)
-either take them to the working places so they meet there with their parents.
9. Electric bikes to rent in the city centre, not really fast, just to use when you are climbing a hill. Expect many bike stations. Bike line everywhere in the centre.
10. None to contribute to infrastructure, just changing their minds, so that with the tickets of the public transport you can afford the changes you make on it.

Spare time with efficient connections

Nature is a very efficient thing : some animals manage in surviving in hard conditions, all phenomena are useful and most look perfect.
I think we have to be inspired by nature and animals : their structure, their way of life, ... Concerning our project, we have to find how nature is coordinated, organised and optimized. That's named Biomimicry and results can be very surprising !
We want to solve the problem of time for everybody so we have to work on a cicrle network. I had the idea of spiders.
The cobweb is a good illustration of how connect different points and to connect them to the center. Sure we can't just copy, we may have to consider parallel metro lines for exmple to go to the center and avoid traffic jam. But spiders show us how to organise the space around a point, so how to go quickly from the suburb to the center.

Summary of what we saw on Wednesday concerning biomimicry in transport, from plants point of view

The planet Earth was born 4.578 billion years ago, but human beings have just been in this planet for the last 200,000 years. In comparison, we've been here for just 0,0437% of the Earth´s lifetime so we came to the idea, why not to think how nature has solved problems similar to ours?
Im focusing on how flowers solved some similar problems. We can focus in two different aspects:
- how some plants manage to get the most water from the rain with different leaf shapes, so that this may be seen as our problem, as you have to canalize all the water that goes into the leaf to the centre of the leaf, so that it may seem as all our people trying to get into the city center.
- from the other point of view, we could try to take inspiration from some leaf shapes that could be a solution for our transport network.
Although imitating flowers could be helpful for us, we are going to focus on Slime mold, a fungus that spreads searching for food in the most efficient way, so we can use this for our problem.

How can Nature help us design new and more efficient transport networks

7.30 in a standard Monday morning. Perfect time for a rush hour, once again. It seems like we are in a traffic jam. Back to square one.

Engineers have not been able to find a solution so far. So, can we learn anything from Nature? I mean: do rush hours exist in Nature? And if there are, how does Nature solve them? Well, in fact we are hiring a new board of experts: slime mold.

A group of scientists from Hokkaido University found out that a species of slime mold, the Physarum polycephalum, could develop in a way that connects two points using the shortest path and, in fact, build a network that connects the energy resources, in this case food resources, minimizing the total length of it.

But can that help us build better and more efficient networks for humankind? To find out, the group of researchers let the slime mold grow over a map of Japan. They put the germen over Tokyo and left food in every big city, so the bacteria had to develop a network to feed itself. To make it even more difficult, scientists, who had discovered that slime mold tries to avoid light, so they put light over the geographical features. It happened to be that slime mold developed a network, which was very similar to the Japanese railroad one. And it also worked in Spain.

So, here is the point: If we could demonstrate that the new network grown by the slime mold is more efficient than the old one, we can use it as a basic design. Anyway, there is still a lot of work that has to be done by engineers, so don’t worry: we are not firing any.

The tranpsort system of the ants

Yesterday we went to a factory that uses biomimitism to produce their products. The factory produces carpets and they are inspired by the circle of life where everything has it use and nothing is wasted. It was a really nice experince. I was impressed from the factory as well as from the hospitallity.
One of our inspirations from the nature was the transport system of the ants and how they can find the shortest and the fastest route back to their nest. All these, parallels with goals of our trasport system, but the insect is better at managing congestion and helping each other move around their colony much more efficiently, than humans. The ants in their research for food they choose the shortest route. But when this route became congested, the ant that returns along the congested route to the nest, collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer into an other path.That is why you never see the tiny creatures backed up and idling along a scent trail, as they busily go about their chores, in an organised and directed way.
A close observation of the animals kingtom and generally the nature can teach us lots of things and lead us to better sollutions.