Friday, May 18, 2012

ECO SPECIAL..Sustainability and INDIA INC.


Sustainability AND INDIA INC

Why Ford and Ashok Leyland are Thinking Beyond Vehicles
These two auto majors are changing their thinking from ‘moving vehicles’ to ‘moving people’, be it through walking, bicycling, metro rail...What seems like a contradiction is good business


    The new Toyota Prius C hybrid hatchback, targeted at the young and restless generation Y buyers, has excited sustainable mobility enthusiasts, just as the recent Indian relaunch of Mahindra vehicles, all fitted with micro-hybrid systems. It signals the mainstreaming of green vehicles. The question, however, is: is sustainable mobility only about hybrids, plug-in electrics, or even about alternative fuels like ethanol? Can we imagine a mobility scenario that has all of this, and more? For example, a vibrant urban transportation system that addresses all the mobility needs of a citizen without the usual mad, frustrating scramble and delays. A system where public transportation is central and personal vehicles peripheral. It’s about time to think of ‘new mobility’. “New mobility is about transportation innovations, and most importantly, linking and optimising them to provide convenient, affordable door-to-door trips for the user,” says Susan Zielinski, managing director, Sustainable Mobility & Accessibility Research & Transformation (SMART) at the University of Michigan in the US. Connectivity between various modes, she says, is critical. New mobility could, therefore, mean building easy walkways for the citizenry; or encouraging bicycling through exclusive lanes; providing seamless interchanges between metro rail and bus systems, either of the bus rapid transit (BRT) variety or the usual city bus network; or even integrating auto-rickshaws, taxis, car-pooling initiatives and coastal waterways into a connected network. The accent is on moving people, not vehicles, right from the first to the last mile of a trip. It also means infusing all these disparate modes with IT and telecom, creating passenger-information platforms that can, say, tell commuters beforehand, through a mobile phone or any device, when their bus will arrive, or when and which metro train to board for their onward journey. It could mean common ticketing, across modes. The global policy environment is keeling towards new mobility and India is just waking up to it. Two policy innovators from New York City (NYC)— Janette Sadik-Khan, New York transport commissioner, and Amanda Burden, NYC planning commissioner—who helped turn Times Square, once a nightmarish stretch of cars, into a delightful pedestrian plaza, visited Chennai recently to talk to city administrators and others. They told the Indians that the obsession of cities to make it “as easy as possible for cars to go as fast as possible” is outdated and that it was about time to promote public transportation. For example, Delhi registers 1,200 new cars every day. Already, roads take up about 26% of the city’s land area. Even as metro rail expands, congestion is common. For ever-expanding cities, a new mobility strategy is inevitable. Curiously, it’s an auto behemoth that is evangelising new mobility globally. Ford Motor, the $128 billion car major that revolutionised mobility with the first mass-produced car in 1908, is perhaps the first to recognise the need for new future transportation strategies.

FORD ‘MOBILITY’ COMPANY

Ford is not only coming to terms with the possibility that the car may be relegated to the background in the decades to come, but is even encouraging it. It is simultaneously tweaking its business model to not only meet this eventuality, but also be a leader, when it does arrive. For instance, it is working with SMART on 12 mobility hubs —where commuters can easily switch between transport modes—in the US. This is a car company lobbying for greater traction for public modes of transportation. Executive chairman Bill Ford Jr unveiled his ‘blueprint for mobility’ at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona in February. In the near term (five to seven years), he said, the auto sector will have to focus on reducing congestion and grid locks on roads. This is expected to give a fillip to vehicle-to-vehicle communication technologies and collaborative consumption like car sharing. A recent German study shows that five cars talking to each other in 1,000 cars can lower congestion considerably. In China, the world’s longest period of gridlock lasted 11 days in 2010. South Korea loses 4.4% of its GDP to congestion. In the long term (2025 and beyond), inter-modal transportation networks, and more, will emerge. By then, Ford Motor will not be addressing individual consumers alone. The company is expected to morph into some sort of an ‘integrator’ or catalyst that will engage with various transportation initiatives, provide connectivity and other technologies, and help entire cities manage mobility better. The ‘how’ of the business model is still embryonic. “Ford Motor Company may eventually turn into a Ford Mobility Company,” says David Berdish, who was hired by Bill Ford Jr after he took over as executive chairman in 1999. Berdish is helping steer the company’s new mobility conversations. “For us, new mobility is to understand the city as a customer,” he says.

ACCENT ON ACCESSIBILITY

The Blue Oval and its compatriots, like Ashok Leyland in India, are advocating the future of transportation as ‘new mobility hubs’ that integrate a variety of modes—walking, bicycling, metro rail, bus rapid transits, para-transits—with communication and technology advancements. The personal vehicle figures only in a sustainable avatar. “Mobility is right in the middle of the intersection of the environment, quality of life and economic growth,” explains V Sumantran, executive vice-chairman of Hinduja Automotive, one of the prime movers of Chennai City Connect, a not-for-profit helping usher new mobility strategies, along with some south-based companies of the CII. Chennai has embarked on a project to transform 60 of the city’s arterial roads, totalling 45 km, to international standards, incorporating a grid plan to ease out traffic at major intersections. The Pallikaranai marsh area is also to be developed with a pedestrian plaza. New mobility need not be grand in scale. It is also small innovations that add up. SMART is already associated with new mobility initiatives in Bangalore, Chennai and Kochi. Zielinksi, on visiting Kerala recently, was impressed with the buyin from public authorities in Kochi. These mindset changes augurs well as the Planning Commission has projected the need to deploy 400,000 crore in urban transportation in the 12th plan (2012-17). Zielinksi, based on her experiences in Asia and Latin America, is tweaking the new mobility concept for a greater accent on accessibility, especially for the underprivileged, as against moving for the sake of moving. Sustainable transportation is about moving less, even not moving. So, for example, Ford Motor is talking to Indian commercial-vehicle major Ashok Leyland on a project that aims to provide economic opportunities to rural communities. The focus of Ford’s SUMURR (sustainable urban mobility with uncompromised rural reach) project is on reducing migration, and consequently congestion in cities. It examines the deployment of wheels in four critical areas: delivery of potable water, primary education, health and renewable energy. For example, a Ford vehicle with a waterpurification plant or equipped with medical supplies and ‘tele-present’ medical practitioners. “In the US, we are leaders in connectivity technology, and we think we can bring some of the insights from there to here,” says K Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader of Ford’s Infotronics Research and Advanced Engineering team. When in Chennai recently, Prasad met with Ashok Jhunjhunwala and his team at IIT, Madras, and also exchanged notes with J Parikh, a former General Motors veteran, and now the executive director, advanced engineering, at Ashok Leyland. Both Prasad and Parikh are certain that sustainable mobility, in the near term, would be all about creating an infrastructure of connected cars, just like Internet-enabled laptops, that can send and receive information. Prasad likens the present lot of cars on the road to “unconnected laptops”, though already 30% of the value of a car is electronics and software.

CONNECTIVITY TECHNOLOGIES

What Ford has been doing in connectivity with cars, Ashok Leyland has been doing with buses. A person at a base station can monitor if the driver of a bus is accelerating fast, braking aggressively, or whatever, and much of this data can be gathered. Arrival time at bus stop, for instance, can be piped into a passenger information system for the benefit of commuters. “All of this makes rider-ship more attractive,” says Sumantran. Retaining existing bus riders and weaning car owners to public transport is going to be critical for cities. Working towards this end, he has stitched up a joint venture with a German firm to develop telematics solutions. A new Hinduja group company, Defiance Technologies, with 1,400 people, is working on a combination of ERP, fleet mobility and tracking, and mobile applications. “We are slowly building the entire system,” says Sumantran. “We have the hardware of vehicles, and the capability to develop and manage software. And, tomorrow, if you tell us to do ticketing, we can do that too.” But all of this hasn’t taken away from Sumantran’s drive on conventional forms of sustainable transportation: fuel efficiency, hybrid and electric technologies, something all auto majors are engaged in. Ashok Leyland, last year, unveiled a CNG plug-in, series hybrid bus, the world’s first. The company has also innovated quickly on the learnings from the BRTs operational in India, by launching the Jan-bus, a front-engine, full flat-floor bus, in which commuters can enter or exit from either the left or right side of the bus. The new mobility champions are already making a visible difference in cities they work in. Berdish, who is passionate about the human rights aspect of mobility, has helped link the slums of Cape Town with affordable transportation networks. Slowly, other auto majors are seeing the writing on the wall and are following the leader. General Motors recently invested in RelayRides, a collaborative consumption carsharing company. Ford already has a partnership going with ZipCar. Bill Ford’s firm Fontinalis Partners has just invested in Wheelz, a college campus car-sharing company. The immediate challenge of congestion is being addressed, for cars will be around for a while, and are even expected to balloon to four billion. Bill Ford Jr sums up the situation: “Four billion cars on the road are still four billion cars and traffic jams with no emissions is still a jam.” So, hybrids and electrics are fine. In the long run, however, mobility hubs and public transportation will be the order of the day. Auto companies that recognise this eventuality, quick enough, will survive.

narendranath.karunakaranET120412

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