The challenge
How do we tackle societal and environmental issues incorporating bottom-up realities and top-down structures? Today, we globally face issues from water scarcity to increasing socio-economic disparities [1]? How do we tackle these global issues with local sensitivity?
The approach
Our approach in Townmaking explores how several individuals collaborate with each other through shared protocols and systems to resolve complex issues. One of the societal issues we wanted to tackle was speeding and unauthorised vehicle access. We developed a family of tools for real-time traffic control, where we can actively monitor the movement of a vehicle in real-time, and determine access, permitted speed, and duration of stay. As an independent research institute, we are responsible for bringing together the government officials, market parties, vocational schools, and organised citizens to make sure all of this works together. Working together, these many parties come together to realise shared practices and solutions. And these many parties then operate these practices and solutions together in real-time for safer traffic [5].
eBike safety
Our initial approach was to make this work with eBikes to demonstrate the methodology [2], shared protocols, and technology. Around a decade or so ago, eBikes gradually started outselling normal bicycles, and along with the increased sales, came accidents. Today, more people in the Netherlands experience accidents and fatalities with an eBike than a car. This is especially true in dense urban parks dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists [4].
Sovereign Digital
From the beginning, we also wanted to build the technologies around a Sovereign Digital Stack without BigTech dependencies or BigTech thinking. We worked using a Knowledge Engineering methodology that could incorporate complex urban situations (Embodied Making), and structured the learning into a Framework, the Safety Clover [3]. We will shortly publish official publications on both these topics, and the references at the end of the article refer to some of the existing work.
Safety Measures
Working closely with the Amsterdam team, we researched the different areas of the city experiencing safety issues. We then built a number of safety measures for eBikes, both before they hit the road and once they were on the road. Safety measures before eBikes hit the road included assessing whether eBike motors safety reacted to changing urban conditions in different zones like a school zone early in the morning with students rushing to get to school, business district at the close of the work day, etc. Once an eBike was sold to a customer, further safety was ensured with periodic safety checks similar to road worthiness certification.
Once a rider or driver is underway, we explored two possibilities to increase safety. The first is a real-time traffic signal, a “nudge”, to prompt riders on safe behaviour as they approach and travel through specific zones in the City. The second is an active power control, a “nanny”, to automatically adjust extra power available to eBike riders. The scope of our current focus in metaCCAZE is the “nudge”, focusing on a specific park in the City of Amsterdam that experiences a very high volume of accidents and near-misses.
Total Value
What we find repeatedly in our initiatives is the inadequacy of economic models when it comes to societal issues. As an example, consider safety in the park. It requires the comprehension and reduction of dangers like poor visibility and reckless speeding. It also requires the incorporation of better courtesy, ensuring we generate conditions where people feel courteous towards each other. This requires the structuring of the total value to society, which we incorporate in the shared practices and solutions.
References
1. Please refer to Regenerative Asset Engineering for some examples of such societal issues: https://rae.townmaking.com/
2. The Embodied Making Methodology: https://www.embodiedmaking.com/search/cls-the-method/cnt-the-complete-embodied-making-movements
3. The Safety Clover: https://www.embodiedmaking.com/search/cls-knowledge-frameworks/cnt-safety-clover
4. eBikes, the rebirth of motorcycles: https://www.townmaking.com/search/cls-policy-adaptive-speed-governance/cls-ebikes-the-rebirth-of-motorcycles/cnt-120-years-of-safety-progress
5. Adaptive Speed Governance Assets: https://www.townmaking.com/search/cls-asset-adaptive-speed-governance/cnt-adaptive-speed-governance-for-ebikes
