On Communities

“More Liveable and Sustainable Communities”

This a title used by Barack Obama in March 2008 (Ref. 1). He states:

“Over the long term, we know that the amount of fuel we will use is directly related to our land use decisions and development patterns. For the last 100 years, our communities have been organised around the principle of cheap gasoline.”

“They also believe that we must devote significantly more attention to investments that will make it easier for us to walk, bicycle and access other transportation alternatives.”

The internet carries all of the previous telecommunications and data services over a single infrastructure that does not care what the data represents. In a very similar way, the shipping container standardised the transport of goods so that a ship can carry any combination of goods without each one having to be loaded, packed and charged for separately.

In both cases, we not only gained huge benefits of scale but have subsequently changed the way we live and work. Together these advances have enabled “Just in Time” (JIT) manufacturing. You can select exactly the type of computer you want on Dell's website and within minutes the components are being shipped into the manufacturing plant in Texas or Ireland. The reductions in waste and inventory costs combined with flexibility and responsiveness would have been unthinkable when it took months move information and goods around the world.

Doing the same for the horribly inefficient and cumbersome local delivery mess that has evolved since the internal combustion engine was invented is long overdue. If we could provide close to zero incremental cost local transport of anything and guarantee delivery within a few hours, we would fundamentally change the way we live. Welcome to the localnet revolution.

I write about localnet in the present tense because it does exist – albeit only in my head and now in the pages of this book and its website. Everything here can be done with today’s technology. Putting it all together is not a difficult technical challenge – it’s purely a financial, political and ultimately cultural issue.

If we’re going to do something radical to our transport infrastructure in order to move towards “sustainable”, let’s see if we can’t at the same time restore some of the good things that many of us can still remember about small communities. Thinks like:

Localnet is a way in which we can change the way communities live in the developed world. In doing so, we will need far less energy and far fewer resources than we do today. The icing on the cake is that it will also make the world a more pleasant and rewarding place to live in. The challenges in delivering this vision are not technical – they are commercial, social and political. If this comes about, a sizeable proportion of the companies that run our economy today will not exist in anything like their present form. There is no one company that is the natural trailblazer for this project. We will have to turn some of our normal concepts on their head. For example, it will not work if unfettered competition is allowed in all areas or if existing companies are allowed to dig their heels in and continue to operate as they do today. There must be regulation and licensing to enforce several essential aspects of the scheme. This can only happen with government backing and, where necessary, regulations. In turn, these require public support and backing. That’s why I’m writing this book rather than trying to persuade venture capitalists to back me in delivering the vision. I don’t believe a start-up company can make this happen on its own.

 

Impact