'Snowzilla' Reveals Limits of Car-Centricity

Friday, 29 January 2016: 

For the past week now, those here in the greater Washington DC area and up and down the US East Coast have been dealing with the advent, accumulation and aftermath of what has been by any measure one of the major snow events to occur here in the past century. Creatively dubbed "Snowzilla" thanks to a reader poll by the Washington Post the storm has among many other things revealed a great deal about the limitations of a transportation ecosystem that despite progress in recent years is still so heavily dependent on individuals owning, maintaining, and driving their own personal vehicles. 

When the blizzard drama begin unfolding a week ago, I was quite literally on the other side of the world - on a business trip to Asia. Through CNN 24-7 coverage at my hotel and the media and weather apps on my smartphone I was able to follow local events here around the clock in real time or better as the predictions came rolling in well before the storm itself. The day before I started back across the Pacific to Los Angeles my connecting flight from LAX to IAD Saturday evening had already been canceled based on the forecast, such that I had plenty of time to set up a pleasant layover visiting relatives in Southern California.

 Thanks to a hard working travel agent in Hong Kong, my frequent flier status, and the use of my United Airlines mobile app, I was able to cram in on one of the first flights back into IAD when it reopened on Monday. Upon landing I was still not exactly sure how I would cover the 6 miles (10 KM) from the airport to my house in Reston: My own driveway was still snowed in and my family reported when I texted right after touchdown that the street in front of our house had as yet received only superficial plowing. Bypassing the long taxi queue I launched Uber on my mobile and selected the "SUV" option.  Within minutes Daniel and his properly equipped GMC Yukon appeared at Door #6 and got me to the end of my own driveway with duly rated "Five Star" service. 

The following day, Tuesday, we finished digging out and also saw the snowplow come through to make a more or less usable single track through our neighborhood. When I ventured out for the first time midday on Wednesday the condition of the residential streets and secondary arterials between our house and the nearest grocery store was still a matter of speculation, with the degree of connectivity my personal mobile device had afforded me from 10,000 miles (16,000 KM) away largely absent from the two cars in our garage, as well as the (mostly much newer) vehicles my neighbors were scraping out of their driveways. The sort of predictive capability that had allowed me to seamlessly reorganize my travel logistics halfway around the world was absent in assisting me to drive in (and out of) my own neighborhood. Weather algorithms - their predictions based as they primarily are now on historical analysis - which were quite accurate at predicting the path and impact storm over the entire region did little to tell me about conditions right now around me during my drive to the local Safeway. Still, dodging chunks of ice, peering carefully around view-obstructing giant piles of roadside snow and maneuvering through un- or under-plowed stretches of pavement I was able to get out for a restock of essentials such as dog food, beet juice and (Libby's) Vienna Sausages. I also noticed that the nearly new Metro Silver Line and Fairfax Connector buses were up and running again, though with less capacity to access them from the neighborhoods.

My most noteworthy Snowzilla experience came not as a driver or rider but as a pedestrian. By Thursday morning pug-walking time, the Reston Association had, as always, cleared many of the footpaths to accommodate residents - inclusive of many seniors and/or mobility impaired people - in accessing the retail complexes and transit stops; not to mention the numerous children that normally walked to and from school. In attempting to walk today, however, I found that much of that effort had been undone as snow clearance activities on adjacent roadways had proceeded overnight, piling mounds of hardened ice across the walkways in a desperate effort to put all of the travel and turn lanes back into service in anticipation of everyone going back to work or school - lanes which were often filled well beyond capacity every day even without snow.  All of this of course made the necessity of everyone digging out to get their personal vehicle back into service even more pressing as effectively the only mobility option. 

"Snowphoria 2020"

Now let's imagine a similar extreme weather event just a few years from now - noting that with the current trend of climate change, however caused, this is a very reasonable possibility. 

While the macro-prediction of weather across and between major regions is still very accurate, now far more localized readings of temperature, humidity, precipitation and icing are available to both commercial and personal vehicle drivers and others thanks to sensors produced by companies like Weather Telematics. Moreover, data from these weather sensors, along with vehicular data regarding road conditions, obstacles, traffic speed and the like can be aggregated in the cloud and fused with the traffic and other data long collected by government and other sources to provide information that is seamless, comprehensive, and most importantly can be instantly adapted to the specific needs of every individual using any mode of travel. This framework of usable Big Data will have been made possible not long after 2016 by companies focused on capitalizing on the value of the bits and bytes themselves as an essential and by necessity shareable product.

Along with the development of data in the back office, things from the drivers' perspective will also have recently changed. Essentially, the vehicle will have evolved from being a transportation asset with telematics features added to it, to being an end-to-end mobile device in itself, fully piped in to the outside digital and physical worlds through terrestrial MNOs and/or via SatCom systems, and with the navigation system, mapping, infotainment, even individual components like transmissions, tires and steering all constantly offloading data and receiving necessary information, instructions, even enhancements over the air with the "things" component of the Internet of Things (IoT) being truly realized in every aspect of the driving environment. 

Beyond the technology itself - with essentially all of the capabilities I have cited previously here already in existence - the enterprise and business models will have similarly evolved to support the connected travel experience through even the worst weather. Everyday neighborhood trips will become much less guesswork and faith, and more like my airline and Uber experience from the past week, combining accurate and timely information with rapid connectivity, relevant predictions, and concrete decision options for any journey. Furthermore, with the increased availability of fleet, flexible, and shared vehicle usage models through options existing even back in 2016 such as ZipCar, Lyft, Bridj, Turo, Car2go and by then no doubt many others, the need for millions to shovel out their individual parking spaces or driveways (or douse them with salt or chemicals) as a first priority will be a welcome thing of the past. 

I would briefly digress to note that I am particularly encouraged by the recent arrival of Bridj in Washington, which exhibited at TRB here earlier this month. Bridj, where the J stands for "Jitney," presents a high tech mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) revival of that hybrid between taxi / Uber type services and fixed route transit popular in early 20th Century North America and used for generations in many other places in the world. The revival of the Jitney was a concept I discussed way back in February 2000 in a Bus World feature about Russia which can be found here.

Whether collectively or individually owned, thanks to connectivity and the data streams mentioned above, every vehicle will be enabled to avoid hazards and optimize routing based on both current actual conditions and reliable expected events whether driving to the corner store, the next city or cross-country. With autonomous / self driving technology (again, and as a reality proven in production well before Snowzilla by Tesla and demonstrated by countless others that merely requires scaling and replication) it will be possible to cost-effectively summon a vehicle to the front of your home for that run to the store, school, doctor, etc. Indeed, with notably fewer cars covering the same number of trips and miles (or even more as the KPMG Study released at the end of last year suggests) the round-the-clock push to clear out all travel lanes, parking spaces, etc., to accommodate hordes of personal vehicles would be significantly diminished. 

From a smarter city perspective, the ability to exchange data across and between modes will reduce the instance of having pedestrians or transit riders suffer on account of motorists, whereby connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) may not require every lane to be cleared immediately versus properly balancing the priorities of walkers or transit riders against car users - with such tools as RideScout (owned by OEM Daimler) having been available even back the blizzard of '16 to ensure a full suite of options and a straightforward, cost-convenience-time predictable experience with any mode or combination of modes tailored for each individual journey. 

In a very real sense the "global" aspect of transportation has already been revolutionized - the positive disruption that is now upon us will and must take place very much at the local level. As the events of Snowzilla 2016 demonstrated, change is needed here more than ever such that the biggest cost of CAV to businesses, governments and citizens, would be delaying their implementation. Fortunately, thanks to the entrepreneurs mentioned in this post and many others, this is not likely to happen such that even if the snow stats of Snowzilla are eclipsed by bigger storms as the century progresses, the impact may be far less even a short time from now as Smart & Connected Transportation takes hold. 

#TranspoTech