Mark Smith on "Human Logistics"

Today, two other members of my project group (Adrian and Mikihisa) and I were in the KTH Wireless Lab in Kista. We had a meeting with Mark Smith, a professor in the Department of Communication Systems at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. We were there to generally talk about our project "The Future of Trains", but the chat was so good that we did not realize how the two hours went by.

Mark has been working with SL to provide them with a new approach to urban transport, for which he coins the term "Human Logistics". To explain his approach better, he said that companies like SL should focus on getting its passengers from 'point A' to 'point B' without them having to figure out anything. He pointed to the mistake made by most companies today to be very vehicle-oriented (e.g. our subway trains are very durable) or specifically-service-oriented (e.g. our buses run on time). Contrary to this approach, he noted that most passengers do not actually care too much about all these details, they rather want to get where they want to get, during which, for some, the priority is price, and, maybe, duration for others. Thus it is important to have a very well-integrated system that is also informative to a great extent.

Another very interesting point brought up in our conversation was about the issue of privacy and trust. CCTVs, phone-tapping, RIFDs and internet privacy are all hot topics of our day. There is very little doubt that information about almost everyone in this world is being gathered at certain points to certain extents. Mark looked at this from a unique angle saying if corporates, states, companies, etc. used at least parts of this information they gather for the convenience of their services and thus for the comfort of their target audience, then the situation will become more of a "win-win" nature for both sides of the debate. Thus the dystopia of the "Big-Brother" state could maybe be reversed in this way. In the context of travel, this perspective might inspire many innovations yet to be realized.

As we left the room to head to our 'disintegrated' transport systems which would take us home, our minds were thrilled by the bits of inspiration from the fantastic talk we had with Mark. It was hard to realize how the two hours just went by; maybe every traveler needs a Mark Smith to forget about time concerns!