Episode 35: Swyft Cities and rethinking urban mobility — with trams!
This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re going a little sci-fi with a startup that’s developing modular, electric tram systems for campuses, cities, and housing developments.
Let’s pan out a little to set up the electric flying tram situation, here.
It turns out we are building a LOT of cities, urban areas, and housing around the world. Jeral Poskey, the CEO of an urban mobility startup called Swyft Cities, told me 2.5 billion people around the world are expected to move to cities by 2050, according to the UN.
Most of that growth is happening in China, India, and Nigeria, and of course, there are smaller scale developments popping up all over the place. To support all these humans, the world will need to build something like a 100 billion square feet of real estate.
That means a lot of embodied carbon, obviously (see previous episodes on that topic, including last week!), but perhaps a less obvious consideration is transportation. Our brains default to cars or even buses or subways, bikes and tuk-tuks, scooters, all kinds of street-level things we’re used to seeing all over the place. But all those things require … well. Streets. As in, a lot of land and sprawl. And the cars require parking—aka land, and the buses require bus depots and the subways require digging.
What if there were another way, and that way allowed for dense urban development that isn’t looming, resource-hungry skyscrapers, but three- to eight-story buildings, walkable city centers, and neighborhoods that are accessible by lots of short-haul transportation like bikes and scooters, yes, but also by modular systems of electric trams that carry a few passengers at a time from spot to spot, like a cross between a Lyft or Uber and a ski-town gondola?
So, apparently, this is a question that Google asked Poskey and other engineers to tackle, because, actually, it was looking to make its campus more accessible. Poskey just happens to have had a lifelong obsession with autonomous guided transportation systems (don’t we all) and was working at Google on transportation planning and real estate development, and after a lot of research and discarded concepts, the idea for Swyft Cities was born.
It’s in prototype stage now, building in New Zealand; Poskey says as they build they company, he’s realized there are also opportunities to retrofit say, college or hospital or corporate campuses with tram systems and then reclaim land that’s currently used to stash cars. But the goal now is to get pilot systems up (no pun intended) and running and prove that it can work safely and efficiently.
Wild? Sure. Doable? We’ll see. Interesting? Absolutely.
Listen to my interview with Jeral here, and please subscribe and tell a friend!
If you’ve heard about other startups or ideas or people doing innovative things to solve the climate crisis, I’d love to hear about them. Email me at in@everybodyinthepool.com and thanks for reading!
“(S)omething has to change. I don't care if it's our solution or not. If we're going to transform cities, I don't know if you've seen the numbers, the two and a half billion people are moving to cities over the next 25 years, by 2050. That's a hundred million people a year moving to cities and it's close to a hundred billion square feet of real estate that has to get built just to support that migration.
There is so much building and every building that we build poorly today lasts for 50 years. So we've got to get ahead of this curve as fast as possible.” - Jeral Poskey, Swyft Cities