Convergence of Mobility and Mobility (ConMaM)
I am a bit obsessed with the idea that travel information plays a crucial (and often overlooked) role in sustainable mobility options.
Ian Sacs on the Planetizen blog has an idea for how one facet of this issue — mobility information on mobile devices — can get more attention. New acryonyms! (If you’ve been involved in the planning or transit fields for long, you are well aware of the preponderence of acronyms that we use.)
Will the planning and transit communinity introduce ConMaM (Convergence of Mobility and Mobility) to its lexicon? We’ll see. But they already are, and need to continue to incorporate the idea into practice:
The technology and transportation industries use the same word “mobility” for two very different purposes. In technology, mobility represents the ease of portability of various devices (phones, cameras, music players, etc.). In transportation, mobility describes the ease of portability of ourselves. The idea of ConMaM is that the more we take advantage of the power of mobile devices, the better we will be able to get around. That is, as we converge mobile devices with mobility systems, we will be able to improve the efficiency and convenience of these systems.