When people talk about transportation in the Networked Society, the focus is often on managing transport flows better or making it more comfortable or profitable.
But what about reducing transportation? And I’m not just talking about more telecommuting. What about taking that next big step beyond 2020?
I’m particularly inspired by two points from our recent paper on Industry Transformation:
- How can dematerialization be accelerated, substituting digital transport for physical?
- How can societal structures reduce the need for transportation in work, leisure and material flows, for instance?
These are big questions, and I don’t think anyone has any definitive answers to them yet. That’s half the fun of where the Networked Society is headed.
But I can glimpse some potential answers in more concrete discussions about the transformation of “last mile logistics.”
The “last mile” actually started as a telecom term for getting telephone lines the “last mile” to individual houses. Now it’s expanded to mean how any business or organization gets its product to its end users. And that’s changing, with lots of talk about 3D printing and drone delivery, for instance.
But while current global supply chains are clearly unsustainable in the face of widespread 3D printing, the disruption of last mile delivery may not be complete. In fact, the rise of online retailing has made last-mile logistics more complicated than ever. Already, car-sharing services like Uber and Lyft are exploring delivery services, as are Amazon and Google with drone projects. Plus there are fascinating experiments in localized “last-mile” delivery, allowing people to buy items locally and have them delivered to the most immediately convenient location.
Interestingly, both the British and US postal services have done some hard – and different – thinking on these lines. They see a hybrid future, with digital distribution and 3D printing sharing space with a still relevant “last mile,” which happens to play to the postal service’s strength.
Many postal operators are already offering “hybrid” services where they receive documents digitally and then ship them locally. British Post is talking about “hybrid mail” and “distributed print,” in which documents or items are transmitted electronically to local production operations, which allows them to “leapfrog” the front-end production and transportation. The US Postal Service, for its part, sees the rise of local or regional 3D printing facilities as a potentially huge business, as they provide the final delivery.
There’s a reason that transport is a key focus of our Industry Transformation work. It’s a foundation of modern society, and its transformation is key to the Networked Society. And while I cant’ tell you exactly where it’s going, I can say it will be quite a ride Image may be NSFW.
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