IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Mobility 59
routes as calculated by computers. 26 The results were startling. It was found
to be possible to reduce the total distance covered by 39 percent, the number
of vehicles by 42 percent, and the number of journeys by up to 50 percent.
Otherwise stated, it would be possible to reduce the vehicle fleet from
19 to 11. 27 Based on these numbers, a project to implement these techniques
on a wider scale has started in the commercial center of Uppsala.
One of the project’s partners—Skandia, a large haulage company—is
rethinking its entire business model based on joint loading, coordination
of delivery rounds, alternative fuels, most effective use of vehicles, and a
new transport management system. Together, these changes have already
delivered savings to the company of 20–25 percent. Future steps promise
to bring even bigger savings. Sweden’s Institute for Transport Research,
having compared different distribution concepts, calculates that it should
be possible to improve the efficiency of deliveries by a factor of six. 28
In Norway, the transport company Tollpost Globe has started to implement
a comparable system. It’s a complex business. When a driver has to
make multiple deliveries or pickups in one journey, there are thousands of
ways to arrange the route. If a vehicle has to carry out fifty tasks in a day,
there are in theory as many as 1065 different ways to schedule them. Tollpost
Globe set out to make a system that would include these variables in
managing traffic for the three thousand individual vehicle transport operations
in Oslo on a daily basis. It connected its global information system, a
database of addresses, and a mobile network provided by Telenor. Each individual
item that is collected or delivered is marked with a bar code (soon
to be replaced by RF tags). Each box is scanned by the driver into a handheld
terminal, which in turn is connected wirelessly to the network. The
traffic management system contains up-to-date information on the location
of each vehicle. On average, each vehicle caries out seven jobs per
hour, and an average of nine minutes separate each task. Therefore, no information
in the system is more than four or five minutes old. This dynamic
planning has reduced distances traveled by at least 25 percent. 29
Logistics systems match objects to space, to moving vehicles, and to other
data, in real-time. As I reiterate throughout this book, these systems have
enormous potential to lighten the ways we use time and resources in all
sorts of contexts, not just in mobility.
But making mobility more efficient will not resolve our core dilemma:
mobility will not stop growing of its own accord, yet perpetual expansion