As commutes worsen, drivers seek solutions

Dan Carney • E-mail

Sometime during the postwar economic boom, two-car households became the norm. A commuting format became well-established — suburbanites got into their cars at their houses and out of them again at their offices. Life was simple.

Today, however, life is dramatically less simple. Gasoline is more costly, commutes are longer (in time if not in distance), traffic congestion is worse and in some cities are even charging commuters for driving in them during the busy morning hours.

The solutions to today’s commuting challenges are many and varied, and the result will be that commuting will no longer be the monolithic point-A-to-point-B solo drive in a car that it has been over the past half-century.

The fact remains that commuters want to use as little time as possible to reach work each morning and return home each evening, and they’d like to spend as little money as possible doing it.

Of course, urbanites have long been able to hop on the train to reach work with reasonable convenience and cost. But suburbanites are less fortunate, and they’re looking at a more complicated array of options. They can continue driving, but they may be doing it in a slightly different way.

One possible alternative will be on display at the North American International Auto Show that gets under way in Detroit Sunday.

General Motors will exhibit the Saturn Flextreme concept — a hybrid-electric car that’s expected to look like the Opel’s Flextreme concept car, which made its debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show last September, and is similar in design to the Chevrolet Volt concept shown at last year’s Detroit show. The car is designed to consume as little fuel as possible while driving to the office.

Upon reaching a congestion zone like those in London and Singapore — where it can be prohibitively expensive to continue driving but may be too far to park and walk — the Flextreme driver and one passenger can park the car and complete the journey aboard the pair of Segway scooters that are stowed in the back of the car.

The Flextreme/Segway combination gives the driver the ability to park a car some distance from work without having to walk the rest of the way and without having to wrestle a bicycle out of the back.

Michael Chia-Liang Lin, Smart Cities group MIT’s ‘Smart Cities’ project is exploring new modes of transportation within cities, including folding scooters.

“Plenty of people are commuting to work by themselves as one passenger, and they don’t need all of the car all of the time,” said Bryan Nesbitt, chief designer with GM’s Opel division, which shares designs and concept cars with Saturn.

By using only as much vehicle as is necessary for each stage of the trip, drivers use the least amount of fuel possible, he added. “The big thing is managing the energy — how much [of it] do I need to get me a certain distance?”

The Flextreme is also interesting for having found a genuinely useful application for the much-hyped Segway scooter, Nesbitt said. “The Segway is a fascinating invention, but it is a technology looking for a market, almost.”

Another commuting alternative is the idea of ditching a second car and using a shared vehicle to get to and from work. The benefit here is that with multiple drivers using the same car at different times, fewer cars need to find parking spaces in the city during the day.

Today we have FlexCar and Zip Car as car sharing services. Unlike rental cars, there is no long time standing in line at the rental counter every time you want a car. Once signed up for the service you just pick a car up at a designated spot and return it to that spot when you’re finished with it.

A better solution for commuting, however, is one-way sharing, where the car isn’t returned to the same spot. That return spot would ideally be near mass transit stations, because the problem many commuters have is that their homes and offices aren’t typically within walking distance of these locations, said Ryan Chin, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on the school’s “Smart Cities” project, which is exploring new modes of transportation within cities.

“Using multiple modes of transportation is always problematic because of the mode switch — your office might not be near a train station,” Chin said.

Shared cars could help with that problem, according to Chin. “You could have a massive fleet of them at the last subway station in suburbia,” he said. At the city end of the rail line, users might be able to use shared Segways to help whisk them the final distance to the office, he added.

MIT’s team is also working on vehicles that nest together when parked — folding scooters and cars — to provide even more innovative possibilities for future commuting solutions.

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