University of Michigan researcher pushing integrated, next-gen transportation

While Southeast Michigan is often criticized as being stuck in a decidedly 20th-century transportation mindset, Zielinski said the region is poised to benefit economically from the emerging models.

“Here’s the car industry here and there are all these brilliant innovators, engineers and IT experts,” she said. “…It’s not a big leap to think of this as a new Motown, the next generation of new mobility and transportation, because all of the different facets are there.”

Zielinski spoke about the center’s work with freelancer Sven Gustafson.

Can you give us an example of a country that is taking this systems approach to transportation that you’re talking about?

Here in the U.S., Portland (Ore.) is probably the winner. In Europe, Germany. Paris is not doing badly; London is doing quite well. We developed what we are doing based on Bremen, Germany. They did a lot to work on the integration. So you’ve got a lot of cities, which have a lot of different modes.

Also, Japan is doing some spectacular stuff that marries the really fantastic IT information like panels that say when the next bus is coming within seconds. And in Seoul, Korea, they have these incredible way-finding cell phone-based things and kiosks for people who don’t have cell phones in places where you have the transfers.

Ann Arbor is kind of an island within the larger car culture of Southeast Michigan. What’s your take on where the region is in moving toward this new model?

I’m from somewhere else (Canada), so I qualify this. Just from the outside, what I’ve seen is that there has been a bit of a depression about transportation among people who would like to see world-class urban transportation here. But recently there seems to be a real desire to move forward and transform our transportation system across the region.

So what I have learned is in just about every county there is something exciting happening, like the transit-oriented development, like some really interesting goods movement, like Ann Arbor’s stuff. Like the M-1 in Detroit, the new light rail that would go along Woodward. Like the different trains that are going to be coming in, like the movement towards high-speed rail. And with the various changes lately, with some of the stimulus package stuff, with the new movement towards more integrated transportation, I think there has been a bit of a mind shift because the sense of frustration (is) breaking open now.

A lot of these countries and regions that you mention benefit from being compact in scale. When you think of the United States, we’re a huge country with lots of urban centers separated by huge rural areas. Is that a disadvantage for us?

What drew me about what we’re doing is it’s not about land-use based transportation. It’s not land-use dependent, although we obviously like the right kind of land use, but that takes a long time; you’re dependent on government policy. You can make it happen without those things right away because it’s got connectivity.

For example, in Cape Town (South Africa), you’ve got the downtown, beautiful redesigned, fantastic land use. And then you’ve got Khayelitsha, which is this township, like a favela, and it’s a long way away, and yet some of those people have to work downtown. And there’s no way. So what can happen - and this is again a business opportunity - where there are these opportunities for shuttles, hourly, rubber-tire buses to go back and forth? Tat’s not there. Why not? Because nobody thought about the connectivity thing.

It doesn’t have to be that the city has to plan it all and provide it all. It can be that new business can come in and provide these really neat services that provide the links. There are so many roles that the private sector can play by being in at the beginning and bringing in innovations from other sectors that could actually address the challenge and define the problem together.

We see huge future markets if two thirds of the world is going to live in city regions and nobody has figured out how to do integrated urban mobility yet.

What is the real estate angle in this? Where does that fit in?

More and more I think developers are beginning to see that, especially after the downturn, they need their developments to be served by a range of transportation modes in order for them to be successful. And so they have a greater stake in seeing sustainable transportation.

Thing two is that transportation isn’t always about moving. I think about it as it’s moving people and it’s moving goods and it’s moving less. So if we can get accessibility through other means, that’s great - especially if it’s more sustainable and more economically viable. In other words, you can achieve sustainability through mobility, through integrated urban mobility, which is what we have to do when we already have the sprawl. You can also do it by technology, like tele-everything: telecommute, tele-work, tele-shipping. Eliminate the trip altogether. That’s transportation.

Who’s going to lead us forward into this new transportation model, business or government?

I don’t think anything has to be a choice. It’s a really, really good question, because unless it’s business-government-NGOs, we’re not going to go forward in the sophisticated way we need to. So there’s a role for everybody.

But there is a much bigger role for business in the creative and shaping sense than we may have thought.

• Contact Sven Gustafson by email or follow him at twitter.com/sveng.