BBC Radio Five Live interview
by Shelagh Fogarty
with Alan Ponsford, Design Director of Capoco Design,
on Radio Five Live, 8:26 am Thursday 7th October 2004.
SF: The design of the public transport of tomorrow. I know we are all more concerned with the public transport of today, Alan, in many ways, but what kinds of designs have been coming up?
AP: Well, we looked very widely at it, both with the Royal College of Art Vehicle Design Department, and also with Helen Hamlyn Research Centre which looks at, as they say, the life for our future selves - as it is for us and for our children.
SF: And it looks ahead to 2025?
AP: Yes. Our company - Capoco - is 25 years old and we said rather than some horrible historical backward looking thing, we look forward 25 years. The team has been led by Merih Kunar, who is an experienced research associate, and I suppose the simple things are that cities will endure - cities are more sustainable than other forms of life - people are moving to cities - particularly in Asia. The other thing is that, having been in London in college 30 years ago, you realize that the built-up environment doesn't change that much, so there's no point in saying start with a utopian clean sheet. We design for the city as we know it now. Merih studied 3 mature cities - he looked at London, he looked at Istanbul and he looked at Hong Kong, and went out with people in different forms of social profile, and videoed and photoed them to see what they needed, and found that there were plenty of 'challenges' in the present system.
SF: I'm told that one the things that's been decided that they might need is buses without drivers that can hook up with other buses.
AP: That's exactly it.
SF: Tell us about those.
AP: Studying it - if you had a perfect machine, it would change size during its trip. In the corridor areas where there are thousands of people per hour going past you need a tram or a large vehicle, whereas back at the residential areas and on smaller roads going into industrial areas, you need a small vehicle. Therefore one of the fundamental things we have been looking at is a pod, which is between the size a medium and large car, and can take from 10 to 20 people, but then can, in the speak of this language, 'platoon' up into a train or tram so that you can move 150 people through areas that warrant it.
SF: But you can just imagine it, can't you - there's been an accident and this clever little car-sized pod needs 10 other car-sized pods because it's getting busy now. How do the 10 pods get to the original pod when the snow has just fallen on the M11 and there are millions of cars in the way?
AP: I was very careful to order a car this morning to come very very early to make sure I was here due to public transport challenges!
SF: Fast-forward to 5pm - you're talking a different kettle of fish.
AP: There's three planks of what we're dealing with - there's the built environment which essentially will not change, there's the vehicle which change a fair amount, but there's the electronic ether that we live in which is changing fabulously.
SF: What's that?
AP: Telecommunications, intelligent transport situations - there's a vast amount of data now, and it's not a great challenge to find out where the vehicles are, where the people on them want to go. I've stepped back and got a stony silence from suggesting that by then we'll all have chips in us like lost dogs, so that we'll know who's on it as well.
SF: There's a piece in the paper this morning - the man who invented the mobile phone was told 20 years ago by his bank manager "it'll never work" - so you never know.
AP: Exactly so - and I think it's difficult to overestimate the effect of the intelligence of smart operations, and I believe it is a way forward.
SF: OK Alan, thanks very much indeed. Alan Ponsford
AP: Many thanks.
