Recently, city officials from London to Manchester to Amsterdam and Melbourne have been wrestling with the appearance of Singaporean oBike and similar bike-sharing schemes in their streets. These dockless variants of the public, pay-by-use bike models being launched in major cities around the world allow users to pick up, pay for, then leave a bike anywhere within an operating city, with no organized storage system per se, just free range. As seamless as this might sound in theory, in practice it’s causing headaches that may be yet another signal of a complicated mobility future that’s emerging as societies transition to new mobility models. New public two-wheeled platforms, like many complex systems, carry cultural values, and those carried in some of the latest bike systems speak to what we may experience in an autonomous four-wheeled future.
In a recent Future Design Intensive at the Dubai Future Academy, one [team] focused on Health futures, and one on Energy futures, had just this experience. From a health point of view, climate change is likely to have a range of potentially negative impacts: increased epidemics due to ecosystem disruption, increased deaths from temperature extremes and destructive weather, threats from dislocation of populations and resources, a rise in stress due to these disruptions, and more. From an energy point of view, climate change is a driver for a more rapid transition to sustainable energy production, a spur to innovation, but also a resource and infrastructure disrupter via flooding, sandstorms and other environmental swings. The implications for both teams have overlaps and connections, but also significant differences.
As we progress to a point where fewer people are needed to pilot vehicles, and more roads become “robot readable,” we will inevitably see new uses being found for roads, and road infrastructure changing to optimize for machine, not human, legibility and use. Given the substantial role human roads play in shaping our social and commercial environments, like rivers and rails before them, streets, buildings, and towns and cities will gradually reshape to reflect machine uses.