Workshop on Transportation

Transportation system is one of the key economic drivers. Its directly related to development, in which case many developing countries are pushing to improve their transportation infrastructures. Installation of the infrastructures considers demographic trends, economic advantages, cultural heritages, mobility ...etc. Reducing the cost of transportation may be one source of advantage to decrease gross domestic consumption of oil. For developing countries that may supplement a huge part of their economy by avoiding oil import - there by decreasing carbon emissions.

Thursday's workshop was discussing about feasible solutions to a set of problems associated with transportation systems design. I and my fellow chose to discuss on Low cost implementation of Mobility on Demand.

Implementing a reliable Mobility-on-demand transport system is a more costly option specially for developing countries, besides the infrastructure bottlenecks. It increases gross energy consumption, congestion and indirectly encourages private car ownership.

Mobility on demand can be implemented best if it is handled using a model like Public Taxi System/PTS/, which can admit private cars as a potential pool of resources. Private owners, while giving service to the PTS customers can add their mile/time or money - based on the business model/ count which could be paid back to them in oil, money or free-ride from the PTS system. This idea is more plausible in developing countries where the number of vehicles is incredibly small to provide Mobility on Demand.

The Workshop showed me the matters associated with transportation systems. And a closer look at the problem from socio economic perspective.