Time is truly the only limited resource. Human spirit and ingenuity has had a proud tradition of overcoming every other resource constraint thru history so far. That is a big “So far” one must add considering “Climate Change” is set to reverse or adversely affect much of the resource abundance humans on the planet have enjoyed in the recent centuries.

Coming back to the issue of Time, I notice the significance of this as i trudge along the road at just about walking pace. The road is full of cars like mine!! and i don’t mean the make, size or type here. It is just that they are almost empty!! two people at the most in some cases.. but nowhere close to optimum capacity one could say.

Now i must declare here that i live in Bangalore and it is notorious for slow traffic attributable to bad roads and in some cases No roads!!. Having said that i know for a fact that this is true across most urban areas of the world.. in spite of considerably better infrastructure when compared to Bangalore.

So you could say that all the cities of the world are being filled up with cars & automobiles to the point where the marginal utility of buying a car to get around faster is Nil, you may as well walk!!. (Although this is today mostly true only in peak hours we are surely getting there).

There this other small thing called “protection from pollution”  that one experiences when in a car. Strange isn’t it..  we buy cars & automobiles nowadays to be able to escape the pollution caused by cars and automobiles!!

Not wanting sound like a novice by ignoring the other multitude of reasons for being a Car owner, i rummage thru my mind to recollect all the branding messages i am normally inundated with.

” Arrived in your Life”  – these days, maybe if you are driving a luxury car. With leasing and renting of such cars now possible, do we allocate such a huge portion of our earnings to own them?

“ In control of my Destiny ” – i decide when i want to start and when i want to leave…… { just that i can’t decide when i will reach somewhere :-)} .                     I feel this to be quite a reasonable need, considering the various individual commitments that one needs to satiate. Maybe Uber & Co. is solving this now to some extent and in the process making it worse at the same time, just imagine replacing a “Owner Driven car” with a “Driver driven” one, with no suitable option of ride sharing. Not going to make a dent on the marginal utility of Time.. No sir!!

” Lowest Cost of Ownership” quite appealing to whole bunch of Indians, i can vouch for this. However surprisingly i am not convinced.. Why? Well if we were really looking at “Cost of ownership” dispassionately , shouldn’t we also be as dispassionate in accepting that the cost of owning a car no matter how low, can never justify ferrying one or two people across short distances (10 to 30 km) at walking pace!! not to forget the self defeating “Protection from Pollution”  issue.

So what is  the way forward, i still need to get to work, without loosing 2 years of my working life getting there!! (3 hr commute /working day)

I came across a review summary by Andrew  Nikiforuk (http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/03/06/Horse-Dung-Big-Shift/)of an interesting Book called “Horses at Work”  by Ann Norton Greene. Switching back a century before cars and automobiles powered the society, it was horses in their millions that acted as blood pulsing thru the economy, transporting and  distributing people and goods. In those days as per the book there was one horse for every human in a city like New York, which seems to be quite the same case with cars these days.

Apparently the Horses were not overthrow by the superior economics of Internal combustion engine, but by political action by elements of the society who were looking for a solution for the piles and piles of horse dung lying about in the cities and to curbing a whole host of diseases (95% of which are supposed to be thru flies that breed on horse dung)

So it appears that waste has taken a different form  from “Horse dung” of the 19th century  to “Air Pollution” + ” Higher Energy Burned/person”+”Loss of Time” etc. in the 21st.

However the Waste of the 19th Century was visible and revolting to the human senses, the waste of the 21st century on the other hand is more like slow poison which is being consumed with alarming human enthusiasm.

How can we move from “consumption lead  passivity to waste” to “Sustainable Collaborative value”?

For starters we need a method to put the waste of the 21st century in the faces of people, we need data, visualization and eventually pricing of this waste into day today lives of people to create a catalyst as powerful as the 19th century “Horse Dung”.

IOT offers a glimmer of hope to address this imbalance that has crept in our society. It can connect Cars, other Automobiles, People, Government, infrastructure  and society at large in ways to produce

• Intelligent Transportation solutions that works for all Ecosystem players
• Regulatory Framework that can incentivize Asset Sharing
• and finally enough data to have a reliable means to capture and price, the full cost to society in using fossil fuel technologies. Leveling the playing field for greener technologies.

The question however remains as to what forces will orchestrate this IOT Evolution to the benefit of the society and why?

We appear to be at a point of inflection in the business world with the big behemoths, the architects of the current state languishing in low growth and profitability, whereas the nimble start ups, the hope for a new future racing away at what seems to be unsustainable speeds.

Will the “Growth Seeking desire” and “Financial Muscle” of large behemoths combine well with the “Survival needs” and “Brisk pace” of  nimble innovative firms?

Will it be “David and Goliath Story” with a collaborative twist ?

Will they together unlock the millions of hours of time that is wasted everyday on this planet?

Will they save the Human Society from an Oil Fired Pre-Mature death?

Interestingly according to the review i read, the car industry lobby magazine in the 19th century was titled ” Horseless Age”.   Can the industry dream up a “Smokeless & Time Efficient Age”  !!!