Near to Far
Have a peek inside…
FREE (PDF) COPY
If you are a student or can not afford to buy my book, I am happy to send you a free (PDF) version of it. Please send me an email at: multimobility@yahoo.com requesting the PDF. Note: I find having the actual (hardcopy) book in your hands - to be a far better experience than looking at the PDF on a screen. So perhaps by getting the PDF, you will look to get the actual book later on :)
Near to Far was designed by Zora Identity & Interaction Design Düsseldorf Germany
Foreword
by Daniel Sperling Ph.D.
I’ve admired Dan Sturges for 3 decades as he valiantly tilted at the windmill of oversized car-centric cities and culture. He has been persistent. He is on the side of angels, but—alas—probably not the right side of history. Dan was the designer and co-owner of an innovative neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV) company in the 1990s. The vehicle, launched over a decade before Tesla, is still in production today, known as a GEM. Alas, the company failed, as he describes, due to aesthetic blemishes, with the vehicle now having passed through a series of owners.
I lured him shortly afterward to the University of California, Davis to take a step back and work with my colleagues and me at the Institute of Transportation Studies crafting people-friendly and environmental-friendly futures for vehicles and transportation. He moved on after a productive year, stretching his immense creativity to design innovative vehicles, mobility services, and land use concepts. His imagination soared.
Over the years, he has touched almost every innovative (very) small vehicle initiative in the US. These vehicles have been called microcars, subcars, NEVs, and LSVs. Indeed, the LSV (low-speed vehicle) name came from the US government defining a new classification of vehicles, motivated in large part by Dan’s original “trans2” vehicle.
This book is a product of his creative contributions. Not many of these visions have endured in the real world, but they should. Maybe we will eventually come to embrace his wisdom. I hope so.
The world in general but the US in particular is witnessing a continuing enlargement of vehicles, with a blip in the 1970s when high oil prices downsized consumers’ demands. Now we are finally facing up to the risks and costs of climate change. With regard to transportation, our response—automakers, consumers, and policymakers—is to electrify our vehicles, without even a whisper about their gargantuan size.
The new electric vehicles are just as big as the gas-guzzling internal combustion engine vehicles they replace. Big vehicles take more space, guzzle more energy, and cost more, creating an especially large economic burden for those less fortunate who inherit them as used vehicles. Given our car-centric transportation system, almost everyone outside central cities needs a car, and thus big vehicles are a social justice issue.
Thus, we come back to Dan’s vision of new mobility anchored by small vehicles. Do we really need huge SUVs and pickups to move one person a few miles, with the new electric versions pushing weights up to 3 tons? Our existing gasoline and diesel vehicles are clearly headed for the dustbin of history, making way for the electric vehicle future, but wouldn’t it be great if those new vehicles were smaller? They would be superior in many ways.
Think about all those minerals and massive batteries needed for this emerging transportation system. Shifting to smaller vehicles and batteries would mean easing geopolitical tensions over minerals, reducing the impacts on communities near mines, and greatly reducing consumer costs, parking and road space, and energy needs. Given that most households already own two or more vehicles, why not downsize at least some of our vehicles and immerse them in more people-friendly land use patterns?
This book provides the history, insights, and most importantly, the concepts and designs needed for more sustainable transportation—creating choices that are better from an environmental, economic, and equity perspective.
Daniel Sperling Ph.D.
Founding Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis (ITS-Davis) and former member on California Air Resources Board (for 16 years, retired from CARB in 2023)
