You'll Never Need to Find Parking Again

In the 21st century, says MIT architecture school head Bill Mitchell, 90% of all population growth will take place in urban areas. Within these areas, 60% of all energy use goes towards running buildings and getting people from place to place. Forty percent of fuel used for the latter is spent looking for parking, of which there is never enough, even though cities devote approximately as much space to parking as housing.

In short, urban design will profoundly influence the future of energy use -- and current designs are a disaster. Mitchell's solution: the City Car.

A concept proposed for dense urban areas, the City Car is a stackable car for two passengers. By placing stacks at key points of convergence, such as bus and subway lines, the system offers travelers the flexibility to combine mass transit with individualized mobility. Each stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them, then users simply remove a fully-charged vehicle from the front of the stack just as they’d pick up a luggage cart at the airport.

Mitchell showed a presentation of the car at Human 2.0 yesterday. It wasn't exactly clear why he was there, given that the conference was about body-and-brain augmentation and the City Car is, well, a car, but it's still a neat idea.

The cars aren't meant to serve the same long-range function as contemporary automobiles, but for use in everyday tasks -- buying groceries, getting from home to the subway -- that don't require space-hogging gas guzzlers.