What, asks transportation consultant Todd Litman, has been the biggest vehicular breakthrough of recent decades?
This:
Wheels on luggage. Rolling suitcases. The freedom to carry stuff while walking.
You can certainly see the effect on the Canada Line. Those who might previously have opted for a taxi now save the cash and go by transit – because they don’t have to struggle to carry their luggage by hand. No doubt, airline charges for checked luggage have had their impact too, along with the desire to pack everything into something carry-on size.
So now a class of people who would never have imagined themselves using transit have become converts. They first get used to taking the train to the airport, then perhaps a connecting bus; they begin to walk longer distances than normal, and start to see the urban landscape as someone in a wheelchair might – a place that has to allow for seamless transitions.
In short, they change their view of how a city can work, and ultimately their place in it.
Not bad for a few pieces of round plastic.
I wonder how much the ubiquity of curb-cuts, originally meant to help wheelchair users, contributed to the rise of wheeled luggage? There must be some reason why the idea only caught on recently. The Victorians could have put ash frames inside their suitcases, and attached hard-rubber wheels. Why didn’t they?
I’d suggest that wheels big enough to roll down standard street curbs are too heavy and bulky to add to a suitcase—but once you have curb cuts, the wheels need only be skateboard-sized, and the redesign is trivial.
Unintended results are everywhere in life. For instance, what would happen if we privatized street parking, and hence charged market rates for car storage? Would those spaces remain devoted to cars, or would the ‘parking’ companies start lobbying for the right to fill them with sidewalk-facing kiosks, barbershops, diners? Is parking actually the most profitable use of that space?
I’d be watching out, not for a mere shift in utilization with a change in price, but for the creative alternatives people devise when they’re not bound by the dead hand of custom.
Interesting question about the parking, but I think parking might just be the most money generating option, the average spot is roughly 160sqft and would cost you ~$300/month that’s almost $2psf which is the same as the rent on a Coal Habour condo, but at a much cheaper cost to build. If you are paying at the meter then the rates are most likely even higher then want Robson St merchants are paying.
Interesting point about curb cuts–but I suggest the reason the Victorians didn’t put wheels on their luggage was because they weren’t needed. Even past WWII most railways had porters at almost every station–and even here in the US where small town stations often didn’t have porters-they did have baggagemen who took care of peoples luggage until claimed. Also–in those days prior to work condition legislation-the weights allowed for baggage were much higher. Many US railroads allowed individual trunks and other baggage to weight up to 150 lbs each (68 kilos) and most passengers left the lifting and carrying of big items like that to professional draymen and baggagemen. I’m not sure what weight limits were allowed by railways in other parts of the world–but if you’ve ever tried to lift an old-fashioned “steamer” truck you know that even empty they aren’t light! It’s only been since the advent of the airlines and their relatively light weight restrictions on baggage that people have tried to carry their entire load of baggage themselves.
It’s amazing to see so many airline passengers not just on the Canada Line, but on many of the intersecting buses, too. It’s not a rare occurrence to see suitcases on the 99 and the 84, which one almost never saw in the past.
I think that Cameron nails the labour aspects, though I think that it’s partly cultural; one wonders what lower-middle-class Victorians did. In China, for instance, where labour costs are fairly low, one still sees a lot of people hauling their own belongings (in those ubiquitous red-blue-white check pattern plastic bags); maybe India has a more ‘British’ tradition of servantness, with the low wages to keep it going?
As for the curb cuts, not sure if it’s a huge impact, though they certainly help. In the photo, for instance, those suitcases are about to roll up three steps, which shouldn’t be too much of a challenge. That said, if you’re doing that every 25m, it might get old.
For what it’s worth, to the immediate left of the frame is the level access exit from the Yaletown SkyTrain station.
I blogged on this subject of wheeled luggage a year ago and was struck — and here is the good news — that some of even the most mundane things are still open for innovation. Lots of stuff left to be done and yes not having to “lug” luggage certainly changes travel.
http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2009/03/do-not-pass-go-without-watching-the-video-in-the-link-below.html
Several links and I too agree that while others had seen rolling luggage — see the links– maybe cheap labor held up its introduction.
Let us now apply imagination to the banal.
Another example, btw, would be shaped skis.
An impressive share! I’ve just forwarded this onto a friend who had been doing a little homework on this.
And he actually bought me breakfast due to the fact that I found it for him…
lol. So allow me to reword this…. Thank YOU for the meal!!
But yeah, thanx for spending the time to discuss this subject here on your blog.