Personal Mobility Vehicle Economics

You say: “that sounds expensive.” One of the things that makes present Personal Mobility Vehicles so expensive is that they are often dedicated to a single person. What I’m proposing can easily be shared because it can move from one person to another, on its own, when and where it is needed.

Increasingly, my father got tired part way into a walk and needed something to bring him back home. Later he would go walking and then forget how to get back, so he again needed to be rescued. That meant that he often didn’t walk, which meant he didn’t get enough exercise, and that leads to many other problems.

Let’s look at dinner traffic in Charlestown:  in the busiest dinner hour we have perhaps 500 people wanting to go to dinner, and each one takes 5 minutes of Personal Mobility Vehicle time.  So each one is only using a Personal Mobility Vehicle 1/12 of the time. 

Using traffic calculations, with that large a group, we get about 1 Personal Mobility Vehicle shared among 10 people, so the cost can be shared among 10 people. Even a heavy user probably only uses 30 minutes each day, so that’s only 1/48 of the time. 

When someone isn’t being moved by the Personal Mobility Vehicle, it can be doing other tasks, like delivering mail and flowers, moving food and supplies, and all the other things for a thriving community.

You say: “yes but a lot of these Personal Mobility Vehicles would have to be produced to make them economical.” Take another look at Kiva Systems. Amazon bought them on March 19, 2012, with vast warehouses, and big plans for speeding up delivery.

If you have followed Amazon’s Same Day Shipping initiative, you can see that I’m not the only one thinking this way – Amazon just hasn’t announced they are applying it to people, yet :-). And Google has also joined this delivery race, and of course Google is already in the Autonomous Vehicle race.

We are on the cusp of technology-enabled Personal Mobility, with even greater changes in transportation and communities. In the next posts I’ll lay out more of my ideas for these advances.