Posts Tagged ‘public transportation’

Tomorrow Thursday February 14th on Valentine’s Day, the Commute Greener team will meet daily commuters in Gothenburg to spread love for the city, nature and for our planet. You can find more information about the event here.

We would like to encourage commuters to change their habits to more environmental friendly ones and influence them to start using the Commute Greener Facebook app. An app designed to give you alternative ways of commuting, you receive benefits, and it allows you to connect, compare and share your progress with friends and family.

In the app you collect points and get rewarded each time you change your travel habits for more sustainable ones. Points can be redeemed into various offers and prizes from companies and organizations that Commute Greener collaborate with, these include but are not limited to mat.se, WWF and Volvo Group. Why not join a challenge and try it out – it’s easy quick and fun!

The application is free and can be downloaded from Apple Store for iPhones and Google play for Androids G. It’s also available on facebook Appcenter.

We wish a Happy Valentine!

Commute Greener team

Thanks to Liene Vanaga and Pavel Rodin.

Usually strange things happen in the last days in October in many places. While we feel for those in trouble by storms we act with positive actions for sustainable development. At the same time lots of people are dressing up, making pumpkins and try to scare each other. And you may not know if those ghosts, zombies, witches and other strange creatures are real or not.

Guess what we met today on our way to work?

At Lindholmen Science Park in Sweden people who commute greener were greeted and others were tricked!

Sometimes these Halloween creatures are more inspiring than horrible and scary. Our one definitely wants to inspire you to change your behaviour at least for one day and chose public transport or biking instead of driving car. This is a chance to get a lot of positive emotions, meet people and experience beautiful autumn days or the season that surround you currently. At the same time you will take care of the environment.

To see the progress and share experiences you can always note journeys, as an organization with a dedicated community, or with rewards via our new Facebook application!

Now, make your own green-minded pumpkin and join our competition! Share it by sending a picture to CommuteGreener@volvo.com or upload on www.facebook.com/CommuteGreener

The most creative one will get some nice surprise from us  -  Everything is possible!

Just try it and Commute Greener!

A posting from guest blogger Frances Sprei, PhD, Stanford University 

I keep having my love-hate affair with public transport in the Bay area. The love part is primarily a love to public transport that doesn’t let me give up on it despite my misfortunes. And just to be fair, some misfortunes are due to my poor planning. As today when I just missed the train because I didn’t have time to buy the ticket. Had I left home 5 minutes earlier I would have been on my way to the city and not sitting in the sun writing, anyway, I finally got a Clipper* card – which you can’t buy at the Caltrain** stations (why make it simple?) but luckily Wahlgrens wasn’t too far away. So let’s see if this helps smoothen my trips from now on.
But what I really wanted to get to was how the design of different trains or vehicles and the stations contribute to the commuting experience. I realized that I have a certain aversion to the BART***, which has lead me to try to minimize the length of trip on BART, sometimes to the prize of increasing my total travel time. So what is wrong with the BART? Well, first of all I must say nothing if you are just traveling a short trip, say max 20 min. But to get, e.g., to the East Bay from Menlo Park in the Peninsula I have to be on it for over 1 hour and I just don’t like that. There are no express options, so no matter where or when you are going you are forced to all those stops. There is this on and off running and you are not sealed from it in any way. On the Caltrain you can often choose to sit up high and create your own bubble, and I love that. I love being in motion in my own world, and it’s just harder for me to get that feeling in the BART.

Then there is Millbrae station, ahhh, just the thought of it… This barren place with no esthetic charm, no place to wait in shelter, no cafe, nothing appealing. Still it’s the only connection place between the BART and Caltrain, so people really easily get stranded here. So what about engaging a designer when planning a public transport system? I believe the whole experience of commuting and going on public transport should be taken into consideration, not just time and costs, of course I acknowledge that these are important – but maybe not sufficient. The idea is to start thinking of how the experience can be made more pleasant for the customers. Other businesses think this way, why shouldn’t public transport? So starting here: What is important for you when you travel on public transport? What would enhance your experience?

Frances Sprei

* A card that you can fill up with money and that you can use on all the different systems in the Bay Area – the only way you can pay for a the whole trip simply, otherwise you have to get a new ticket each time you transfer to another operator
** Caltrain is a commuter train that runs in Silicon Valley between San Jose and San Francisco.3
*** BART – Bay Area Rapid Transfer, Something between subway and commuter train that supposedly connects the whole Bay Area.

Circulating for a while on the net I hope that by sharing this small quiz it is possible for most of you start 2012 in a good way

Commute Greener!

This April me and my family moved to Menlo Park just south of San Francisco from Sweden. Both me and my fiancé are researchers devoted to solutions to climate change so we have a built in resistance to own a car and try to minimize its use. So when we moved here it was obvious to try to do it without getting a car. This turned out to be quite a challenge at least until we got settled down.

The good part is that at least public transportation exists here. The problem is that it does not go very frequently which we learned the hard way.  One day we just missed one bus and decided to wait for the next one. One hour later, and many “When is our bus coming?” from our son, the bus finally arrived. Luckily it was a beautiful sunny day and we were not in a hurry. Another time it took us three hours, we walked 3 km and took 2 buses and had a short stop at a grocery store, to travel a distance that took 15 minutes by car.

Now we are settled and everyday living without a car is actually quite smooth. After getting our apartment we quickly purchased two bikes and a bike-trailer for our kids. Menlo Park and Palo Alto are actually very well suited for biking. Good weather, flat landscape, good bicycle paths and you can bring the bike on the buses, commuter trains and even some subways. The kids like riding in the back even if it took some time for the smallest one to get adjusted to the helmet. And you can transport a lot of things in the trailer combined with a basket I have on my bike.

Another day after having bought a booster for the car, vacuum cleaner, shoe rack, pillow and some other small items at a major shopping center; the cashier gently asked us if we need help getting the things to the car. We said “no thank you, we are just going to take it to a bus and then on our bike”, her chin dropped and she was speechless. After three months however we did succumb to the pressure and bought a car, a used Toyota Prius. We still do our everyday life – commuting to work, taking the kids to pre-school, buying groceries – by bike but we wanted a car to be able to explore the beautiful nature around were we live, that is not accessible in any other ways. So now we enjoy a spontaneous outing to some of the open space reserves on the weekends. The challenge now is not to overuse the car and to stick to the bikes and public transportation when this is feasible. And maybe that is more realistic challenge to pose to families, or what do you think?

Frances Sprei

Hi everyone!

No I haven’t gone crazy. That headline is actually correct. One of the buses in Gothenburg will take part in a study of new tech aimed at reducing the number of unnecessary stops the buses makes at stoplights. The bus driver will be given info from a small gadget on the light-pole and the appropriate speed to approach the stoplight will be shown on a screen. Then the driver won’t have to stop and can just keep driving as they arrive in time for the lights to switch to green. In other words; this new tech will help the driver drive eco driving.

In eco driving you try to approach stops at a speed which means you won’t have to stop. This is easy once you get the hang of it, at least with a car, but you have to give it time. If you are stressed out and have a tight schedule to follow it is probably not as easy to calculate which speed to hold and to take appropriate action. This system seems like a good way to help the driver to plan away unnecessary stops while giving the travelers a smoother ride. Not only that, but starting from 0 km/h require a lot of power and burns extra fuel, which of course emits extra CO2. Removing those stops removed the need for this “extra CO2″. Good, right?

This test is a part of a larger testing of several kinds of communications used to organize and make traffic smoother. Vienna and Salerno are other cities involved in this EU-project, and in those cases it is all about smoothing out traffic going into the city and through road construction sites. These are major bottlenecks with lots of cars standing still, and it is important to try and smooth these situations out in the future.

This tech is so cool. It helps making traffic safer, reduces emissions and is so simple. Eco driving is getting more and more popular, at least here in Sweden where it is a requirement for getting the license, and buses are quite able to drive like this as well. I have ridden with drivers using this technique a few times and it tends to be less twitchy, smoother and more comfortable. So it is a win win. IN the article there were some concerns over irritated drivers not understanding why the buses approach the stoplights so slowly, but come on! That behavior is getting more and more common anyway. As drivers they have the responsibility to adapt their driving to the conditions. You simply can’t stop progress just because some people might get mildly upset.

Communication is a huge thing when coordinating traffic and reducing emissions. This little experiment will surely be interesting for public transportation planners all around the world. I hope it will give us travelers smoother rides and reduce emissions from the transportation sector a great deal in the future. Good luck with the testing!

/

Fredrik

A green, or sustainable, commute doesn’t have to be difficult, boring or uncomfortable. A bus ride with a good book and some nice music in the morning sure beats getting stuck in the stress of rush hour traffic right in the morning. But a green commute demand some kind of planning. Driving in general doesn’t. At least not as much.

One tip for the budding bus commuter is to read up on the ticket system. Not knowing costs, how it works, travel times, and so on can actually be a game breaker for many people who aren’t used to riding the bus. Let’s take an example, the ticket system here in Volvo’s home town of Gothenburg;

The system uses cards with magnetic strips loaded with money or an area charge, and you check in when you board the vehicle. If you travel over public transportation zones you have to press a button when boarding and remember to check out by holding up the card to the check in machine. If you are just traveling within one zone (usually a city/town) you don’t even have to check out. Sounds difficult, right?

There are a few more quirks to the system, but let’s leave it at this. The point is that this system have become heavily criticized at every turn. The checking out procedure seems to be what irritates most people, as they forget and have to pay more then they should if that happen on a bus/train line that goes over several zones (ie. through several cities/towns).

Granted that is NOT good design. Stuff like that shouldn’t be possible, but how difficult is it to remember to check out when getting off the vehicle? Very difficult apparently. But if you just read up on how it works and make an effort to understand the system, where information is available on several buses/trains, at the stations and in info huts as well as on the local public transportation offices homepage you can actually avoid problems. I personally have never had the problem lots of people describe with this system.

The ticket systems differ in between countries and between cities, but the same rule apply. Preparations and knowledge makes the commute smoother and easier. It isn’t that difficult, just be sure to know how you pay, what it will cost, when the bus comes and when and where you will arrive. Easy, right?

Public transportation is surrounded by lots and lots of superstitions. It is dirty, noisy, uncomfortable, filled with thugs that will rob you blind and it costs way more then simply driving to work. My experiences  tell me that this is wrong on so many levels. But you have to plan a bit more as you have times to follow, and has to have to be able to pay for the trip. It also helps to know alternative routes, but that is a bit overkill if you just want to green up your habits. And opting to take the bus saves a lot of CO2, as well as space on the roads. A buss will swallow some 50 passengers, which may mean 50 cars less on the roads. That means large amounts of CO2, particles, NOx, SO2 and noise are saved.

Climate change as well as local environmental problems are running rampart. You can help do something about this by simply taking the bus. That may seem like a daunting task for those who have never tried, but gather some friends/coworkers and do it together. Make sure you know the basics and enjoy the joyful ride to work with a good book and some nice music. Or the newspaper. Or some facebook time. And while you do that you are helping making the planet better. Sounds good?

/

Fredrik

By the way, go ahead and try Commute Greener! and see that you really can change our habits and save a lot of CO2 in the  process.

The 16th of August (today 2 months ago) was a somber day for sustainable transportation, since one of its giants, Lee Schipper passed away. I met Lee for the first time in Berkeley in 2007 at a transport conference. He wanted help to gather some transportation data from Sweden. He was always in search for data, good data, always struggling to really understand data on energy and transportation and to get it right. And justly so, it is a jungle out there. He wanted to truly understand energy and transport trends and then you have to dig into the dirt. He was also never afraid to ask question and question so called truths. Making him thought provoking and a source of learning for all of us.

But Lee was more than a researcher that authored over 100 papers and wrote books, he was also a doer. He made sure to push people around the world to do the right thing, such as Bus Rapid Transit systems in Mexico city. He founded Embarque the World Resource Institute’s center for sustainable transportation with offices worldwide. He has definitely left a mark in any institution or office working with transportation around the World.

At the conference in Berkeley I got to experience Lee the musician as well, when during one of the social events Lee played the vibraphone with his band the Mitigators.

My path and Lee’s crossed number of times the following years, at conferences and dissertation defenses (including my own). He was very supportive of my research (as he was of many researchers around the world) and helped arrange a post-doc at Stanford that I started late spring this year. Unfortunately Lee’s illness took overhand and I never had the chance to work a lot with him. But I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to meet with him, discuss with him, getting e-mails from him sent at 2 o’clock in the morning from a Toyota Prius taxi on his way home from the airport (no matter when you wrote him he would quickly respond).  James Sweeney, the director of Precourt Energy Efficiency Center where Lee was a senior researcher, called Lee, righteously, “a force of nature” and will be terribly missed. We can all honor his commitment and his energy by doing our part in creating a more sustainable world, be it by doing research on sustainable transportation modes, working on and promoting new transport solutions or commuting greener. Let’s do our best to keep Lee’s spirit alive!

Frances Sprei

Hi everyone!

Autumn is here. The trees are shifting in beautiful colors of yellow and red, leaves are filling the streets and the air has that wonderful little chill to it. There sure is a lot to like about this season. One thing NOT to like is the constant rain and winds though, am I right?

Autumn is kind of an odd season when it comes to preparing for the commute. Mornings are cold, but it is quite warm during the day. Rain comes without warning at the most random intervals, and mud get everywhere. Not the easiest time to commute, right? Well, no. Not if you skip preparations.

As always, proper preparation is the key to make the commute easier. It is all about small things, like paying attention to the weather reports, choosing which sort of transportation suits the day best etc. For example, if there is a total downpour outside then by all means drive. But make sure you do so in an eco-driving fashion. Maybe you can even pick up some colleagues on the way. If it is a clear but somewhat cold morning, then wear a sweater, but make sure you can remove it when you get to work. This isn’t exactly rocket science, right. A chilly morning sure makes you awake and ready for when the day starts, which is actually quite a nice feeling.

I feel a list coming. Yep, thats it.

• Bring a small umbrella in your bag. You don’t need those huge things so many are using, a small one is perfectly functional for surprise bad weather. You can keep one in the bottom of your bag, or even in your pocket if it is a very light type of umbrella.

• Choose a good waterproof backpack. Especially if you are lugging a computer around like so many office workers do today. That can be a lifesaver if you get caught in some nasty weather.
• Use sturdier shoes then the nice one you are working in. Yea, this one is for those who have to look presentable at work. But hey, I see people in low shoes without padding on the bus all year around, including frosty mornings and the whole winter season. Why freeze and go wet all day when changing to “work shoes” when you get there is so easy?
• Be sure you know the bus/train/subways timetable. Getting stuck waiting is bad in summer, but when it is raining and/ or cold, you don’t want that.
• When biking, be sure you wear warm but breathing clothes. Your coworkers will thank you:)
• Public transportation, especially rail bound that goes above ground, often run late when leaves and ice clog up the rails. This is something we have had a problem with several times in Gothenburg, and I am sure it isn’t a totally isolated problem. Be sure to have enough time so you don’t get late.
• And the last point on the list; don’t get discouraged from choosing greener commute options just because the summer with its lovely weather and warm mornings are over. It is more then possible to make the commute sustainable as well as comfortable regardless of season, it is just a matter of preparations.

When it comes down to it, sustainable everyday transportation should be something natural. That car is just too convenient and comfortable. It is easy to simply choose the easiest option when the weather is bad and the cold is creeping in, but trust me on this one, it is perfectly doable. It is even quite comfortable if you prepare according to the weather and season. With climate change and all kinds of environmental problems getting more and more apparent it is important that we change the way we live. Taking the bus, or getting a rain kit and bike is quite a small effort which can bring about other changes. And every small step counts. Try it out. After a couple of weeks you will probably feel like you have done it forever. And you have done the planet a big favor.

Fredrik

The world’s first TravelHack was concluded yesterday, and as co-organiser in the ISET-project Magnus Kuschel, the always enthusiastic founder and manager of Commute Greener, presented the Volvo Pimp Commute Greener Award. The happy winners are Team Code Monkeys, their TravelHack contribution was “Find me a Ride“. The prize includes a unique developer contract within the global Commute Greener open innovation community – congratulations and welcome Tommaso, Ali and Hamid!

The winners of the grand prize, The Best Prototype Award, consisted of several Volvo IT employees under the team name of Green bITs. They presented a novel gamification of smarter commuting to “stay cool on the way” and below you see: Robert Valton, Fredrik Westman, Gustaf Nordin and Karl Risenfors.

To see more of the show, like already >1000 persons have done, follow the WebTV channel here.

Commute Greener!
/Karin