Latitude has launched a new study to investigate; today’s options of sustainable transportation; how to get people to use them; and what technologies enhance peoples’ experiences. Written in collaboration with Next American City, Tech for Transit: Designing a Future System, will present conclusions from the experiences of participants in Boston and San Francisco who volunteered to park their cars for one week and find other ways to get around.
The study will share participants’ choices and motivations for the alternative transportation used and will also offer their suggestions for improvement. The goal of the study is determine how transportation providers and technology companies can encourage use of more sustainable transit and to improve transportation design by making the various modes complimentary for users.
“Transformations to the organization of our cities will undoubtedly come from how advances in communications technologies are reshaping our personal interactions,” explained Mathias Crawford, Research Manager at the Institute for the Future in a recent article. “So, one way to apply futures thinking to city planning is to think about how information technologies are changing the way that people conceive of themselves within cities, and the reasons they move around them.”
September 22, 2010
If you would like to participate in this study, click here.
(Please allot 5-10 minutes to take a brief, online screener.)
Transportation is an essential part of human life; it influences where we live, where we work, how we socialize, our personal finances, and our general quality of life on a day-to-day basis. It also has an enormous impact on the environment—automobile emissions represent a leading cause of global warming. What’s more, owning a car is sometimes a hassle instead of a benefit, and it costs a bundle:
Car-sharing services and green car companies have made worthy progress to minimize the various downsides of car ownership, but there are significant, untapped opportunities for alternative (non-automobile) transit options to improve our everyday experiences and spare the environment. In this spirit, Latitude is conducting a study to investigate how cities, transportation providers and technology companies can encourage use of more sustainable transit already in existence (from walking to biking to ride-sharing programs and beyond) and improve the design of transportation so that various modes work together as a fluid system, offering real value to individuals’ lives.
Central Study Questions
- What are the various options for alternative (more sustainable) transportation these days, and how can cities encourage people to use them?
- What role can Web, mobile, real-time, and location-aware technologies play in improving transit experiences?
- How we can better design various transportion modes to function together, creating a fully integrated and more intelligent system of transportation?
