Folding cars offer solution to urban transport problems (BBC Future)
By Steven Ashley
Motorists must be a determined bunch. Crowded roads, jam-packed parking lots, and rising fuel prices – not to mention greenhouse gas emissions – don’t seem to be enough to persuade the average car commuter to hop on public transport. But a folding electric vehicle (EV) hopes to change all that and convince commuters to leave their car keys – and the gas guzzler – at home.
Micro-EVs, as these vehicles are known, could enable cities to solve a long-standing mass-transit problem: How do you get commuters who don’t live or work within walking distance of a transit station to take public transport? Urban planners call this the “first and last mile” conundrum.
By deploying fleets of lightweight, folding electric cars at strategically distributed electrical charging/renting stations throughout a city and its suburbs, these vehicles could help ease traffic congestion, parking problems, and might even keep the urban air cleaner as well.
“The first-/last-mile problem has been growing steadily during the last 50 years or so as cities expanded,” says Elizabeth Deakin, a city and transportation planning expert at the University of California in Berkeley. “It’s often just too far to walk to a mass-transit station.”
Space-saving idea
In some crowded cities, bike-sharing programmes or hefty levies on city-centre driving have yielded some success. But a little more than a decade ago, members of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began to think about another option – an elegant, compact electric micro-car designed purely for city car-share use.
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more (incl. slideshow):http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120613-folding-cars-offer-city-solution
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