Beam me up, Scotty!

This blog was sent to me by Caron Greenough, a Senior Transportation Planner based in Auckland.

I'm a transport planner and have been for a number of years. As I've moved towards more sustainable transport planning, it has occurred to me that while we're planning for the next 20, 30 or 50 years, we're planning for the type of transport we have today. We are still planning for the fossil fueled, single occupancy, private motor vehicle plus a few buses, trains and bicycles thrown in for good measure. To be perfectly honest this really frightens me!

The motorcar in its present form has only been around for 100 years and was invented to get rid of pollution created by horse manure. So, here we are today, trying to get rid of pollution created by the horse-less carriage. Twenty, thirty years in the future is a long time in the scale of the things so there is a huge possibility to make a difference, but who is going to force that change, and what is transport really going to look like in the future?

To assist my curiosity I decided to invite some futurist thinkers to a "Beam me up, Scotty!" morning. Forty-eight twelve to thirteen year olds from four Auckland schools came together at Howick Intermediate School for a morning of inventiveness and creativity. Far out ideas from bubbles to hippogriffs (think Harry Potter) to propeller hats were proposed. Eventually one idea from each group was developed further and they had an opportunity to build a prototype out of the bits and pieces of cardboard and plastic cups available.

The three judges, Matthew Laws from Inro Technologies, a robotics developer, Duncan Ledwith, from the ICE House in Auckland and Jon Lewando from GHD, an engineering consultancy, were fantastic and really got their hands dirty with the kids, helping them develop their ideas, giving them clues about what might work and what might not.

Jon was quite amazed just how much knowledge the children did have, although one team were quite surprised when he told them that hydrogen powered vehicles had already been invented!!

In the end, the lure of the car was great and many of the ideas still had car type features – alternative fuels (converted from waste food), conveyor belt roads and cars with propellers to name a few. The eventual winners were from Somerville Intermediate School in Howick and won overall based on a whole range of things including teamwork, innovation, and quality of final presentation. The compressed air, solar paneled, jet pack was the new mode of transport. Not quite "Beam me up, Scotty!", but not bad!!