Simon Hendery: Canterbury students to take green transport idea to the world

5:00AM Thursday May 08, 2008
By Simon Hendery

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Some of the country's brightest young IT minds have spent every spare minute over the past few months thinking up ways to save the planet.

After gruelling rounds of brainstorming, programming, prototyping and enduring Dragon's Den style interrogations, the best green student technology initiative has been selected.

The focus of all this studious endeavour? The Imagine Cup, a Microsoft software design competition where the mandate was to "imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment". The prize for the best entry includes a trip to Paris to compete against teams from 50 other countries in the global finals.

The winning New Zealand project, announced in Auckland last week, is the brainchild of four Canterbury University computer science students. It is a system to control a fleet of urban "Taxibuses" one of which would arrive at a commuter's doorstep within minutes of them sending a text message requesting transport.

"The thing we noticed was that cars are really convenient but bad for the environment and buses are not very convenient but really good for the environment," says team member Janina Voigt, explaining how Team Phoenix came up with their idea.

"We just wanted to take the best of both worlds and make a new form of transport that was both convenient and environmentally friendly, and also cheap," she says.

The team's claims during the competition's presentation stages that its "Taxibus" system could deliver an environmentally-friendly network of commuter vehicles available almost instantly across a city for a few dollars per ride, met with cynicism from those hearing the idea for the first time.

But Team Phoenix's academic mentor, Canterbury software engineering lecturer Warwick Irwin, has no doubts about the project's veracity.

"The numbers are pretty solid because they did a very rich simulation that does all the clever stuff like work out there's more demand at certain times of the day," Irwin says.

"The numbers just stack up with a really broad range of parameters."

The Imagine Cup judges were also convinced. One of them, Andy Hamilton, head of The Icehouse technology incubator, went as far as warning the team to clam up about the intellectual property behind the project so others didn't attempt to copy it.

Without giving too much away, Team Phoenix have devised a clever algorithm capable of matching passengers heading to various destinations with a fleet of Taxibuses servicing a particular centre. And they have simulated the environmental impact of their system and the number of cars it would take off the road.

"The big barrier we see to mass adoption of public transport is the convenience thing. So if we can get a convenient form of environmentally- friendly public transport out there we think a lot of people would use it," says team member Stephen Fitchett.

"And if we can get, say, one in six people in Christchurch to use it, that would halve the carbon dioxide emissions amongst those people which would save 31,000 tonnes a year."

The enthusiasm exuded by Team Phoenix, and the other three teams they squared off against at last week's finals, was infectious.

The other finalists' ideas - including energy-saving devices and an online environmental game - also impressed the judges, who said there was only a 4 per cent margin between the scores.

As Team Phoenix prepares to take its project to the world finals, the quartet of budding technology entrepreneurs will also work on protecting their IP.

"We've come up with something that is going to go beyond the competition," says team member Yugan Yugaraja. "In November [when the project began] we wanted to get to France, that was our motivation. Now the motivation's all sorts of other things as well."