Between Private and Public: Mutual Transportation

Abstract

The discussion about transportation has been polarized on public vs. private transportation, e.g. bus vs. cars. In this chapter I present an intermediate solution, i.e. using private cars as public transportation. We have called the model “mutual transportation”; developed in 2005, it has been presented in several conferences and proposed to a number of local government and traffic authorities. It is now applied in some cities and metropolitan areas. Besides the technical solutions, which are based on telecommunication technology, the novelty of the system proposed is that it has been devised and designed by humanists rather than by engineers, who have been hired later to solve some technical problems identified by social scientists.