Data is laying out the future for the auto industry and they are responding - car makers are seeing the demand for more community space and fewer roads and parking lots. This shift in how cars will be used in the future is driving auto companies to innovative partnerships, new investments and cutting-edge product development programs.
In 2013, the urban designer Mikael Colville-Anderson struck a chord with transit geeks via, yes, a blog post. By coloring in photos of familiar urban streetscapes on his Copenhagenize website, Colville-Anderson highlighted how unequally road space gets divvied up between autos, bikes, and pedestrians.
His argument for the “arrogance of space” opened the floodgates for a thousand other data visuals. The latest comes from Moovel Group, a German software firm that produces transit and mobility apps (it’s also an unlikely subsidiary of the automaker Daimler). Moovel restates Anderson’s basic argument with an algorithm-generated, visual inventory of “mobility space” in Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, and 18 other world cities.
In “What the Street?” Michael Szell, the researcher-in-residence who spearheaded the project, adds up the square meters doled out to cars, trains, and bikes—in parking areas and rights-of-way—and stitches together the total area that each mode receives. Select one city at a time, guess how much total space is allotted to each mode, then take a gander at the quantified and visualized answer. What emerges for cars in most cities are a scroll of parking lot footprints and a vast skein of street space. For trains, it’s two tidy coils of rail yards and train tracks; for bikes, it’s a pair of skimpy strings.
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