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When Every Private Vehicle is an Ad-Hoc Shared Taxi. When...

Many private vehicles in Tehran operate as shared taxi's - stand in the road stick out your hand, communicate your destination through the window of the slowing vehicle and if he or occasionally a she, is going your way then you have a ride. The resulting dance looks somewhat like mixed gender curb crawling with both men and women peering into car windows agreeing on the details of the transaction in advance and hopping in.

The process is relatively efficient - single occupancy cars taking on passengers to travel routes they are likely to travel anyway, and the process makes me wonder why similar practices haven't evolved informally in places like London, Tokyo or New York. Yes there's car pooling in places like Los Angeles but it's mostly pre-arranged and not as widespread as in Tehran.

Is this kind of service more likely with: a means of screening potential customers; and our abilty to increasingly micro-coordinate making smaller decisions later?

Mobile devices are already capable of running as fully functioning nodes on the internet i.e. not just a terminal, and can in effect act as a personal and proximate, digital, connected presence. What ad-hoc services will be provided in markets such as Tehran? How to design these services in a societies where the boundary between official and unofficial is at best blurred?

When every car is an ad-hoc taxi, every everything can be an ad-hoc something.

Heading to Finland on Sunday if any of the Helsinki crew is around?

Writing from Tokyo | November 10, 2006 | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Janne at November 10, 2006 5:02 PM