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The Last Mile
If you work at a participating company near
the
Pleasant Hill BART station in Contra
Costa County, you can pick up a
Segway™, which looks like a giant lawnmower on two wheels, to
commute that last mile to work. Or you might want an electronic bike, or a
regular bike. It’s your choice; your company pays for the rental.
According to
Innovative Mobility Research, which is
running the experimental program, it’s the last mile or two that people
have to travel to work once they get off a train or bus that is a sticking
point in their decision to use rapid transit. “We’re encouraging them to
take the train by providing a way to travel that last mile with one of
these devices,” says Dr. Susan Shaheen, IMR program leader .
“Our idea is to enhance these transit villages with innovative mobility
solutions,” she says. “A lot of transit villages are wonderful and focus
on providing mixed use, but often they don’t look at providing other forms
of mobility to people living there.”
The program, called
Easy Connect 1, addresses the last mile
problem of the transit commute to the employment center. “The intelligence
behind it is the shared vehicle system of reserving the vehicles,” she
says. There’s an electronic bike locker which utilizes a smart card to
rent the locker on a daily basis and use it for storing your own bike or
for a shared bike.
A second phase, EasyConnect 2, will allow for online reservations of bikes
for daily and hourly rentals. They will also augment with car sharing,
smart parking
management and
stationary fuel cell
technology that can be used to power up electric bikes and
neighborhood electronic vehicles that will also be in the fleet.
Pleasant Hill is a field operational test project developing a prototype
technology being used for the first time, explains Shaheen. “What really
excites me about this is the idea of providing people with choice. One day
it might make more sense to drive your own car using smart parking
technology. Another day it might make more sense to use a car sharing
vehicle. You can choose from a bundle of alternatives, plus, of course,
the traditional transit.
Links
Photos of the Pleasant Hill Bart Station are available
here.
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