Haunted by the nightmare of global traffic paralysis, Ford Motor executive chairman William Ford Jr. has a global dream.
Given current growth trends, the world's population is expected to reach 9 billion people by midcentury. That also means a quadrupling in the number of cars to 4 billion by 2050 -- and that,said Ford, is a recipe for global gridlock that he argues will become "a human rights issue, not just an inconvenience."
For Ford, the executive chairman of the auto company his grandfather founded, the only answer is to create a future where pedestrians, bicycles, and cars become part of a connected network.
The world is still far from realizing that vision, but collaboration between urban planners and technologists is starting to provide the pieces to fit into that bigger puzzle. For instance, city planners in the Dutch city of Eindhoven know from data beamed from cars where roads are dangerously wet. In Lyon, France, the Optimod'Lyonnetwork lets the public pick the fastest way to work. Drivers in Singapore now use location data gathered by taxis for a forecast of the next hour's traffic patterns.
We're only in the early stages of a larger transformation that technologists believe is inevitable given the prominent role that computer technology will play in the car of tomorrow. Some of the infrastructure already exists. Many cities now have central traffic control systems to adjust traffic-light timing and tweak traffic patterns. In the future, the idea is to turn the car into a four-wheeled networked data-collection device, offering city planners accurate information about local conditions so they can better manage urban congestion.
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