Want That Parking Spot? Place a Bid.

What if you could bid on a parking spot eBay-style? Let’s say you have an emergency doctors appointment; you might be willing to pay $50. But if you’re just meeting a friend for lunch, you might opt for a 50-cent spot a half mile away. In this week’s installment of The Future in Motion series, we release two clips from MIT Media Lab’s Smart Cities Group: Bill Mitchell and Ryan Chin, two innovators who are busy reinventing the car and urban transportation altogether.

Chin describes the future of a shared transport system, where the traditional car is nothing more than a relic. What if the automobile’s exterior could change with the push of a button?

As part of this series, every Wednesday until April 7, we will release new interviews with people who are changing the way we get from here to there, from entrepreneurs to policy makers. So far, we’ve featured interviews with Richard Schaden, Aeronautical engineer and founder of Beyond The Edge; Mitchell Joachim, founder of Terreform ONE; Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogata; Felix Kramer, founder of the non-profit, California Cars Initiative; and famous aerospace engineer Burt Rutan. The schedule for the following weeks is as follows:

· March 17: Geoffe Wardle, Director, Advanced Mobility Research, Art Center College of Design.

· March 24: Nathan Lewis, Professor of Chemistry, at the California Institute of Technology.

· March 31: Joseph Sussman—Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Specializing in “Complex, Large-Scale, Interconnected, Open, Sociotechnical’ (CLIOS) strategic transportation systems.

· March 31: Douglas Malewicki, Aerospace engineer and inventor of the SkyTran, a Personal Rapid Transit system that uses magnetic levitation tracks to achieve the equivalent of over 200 miles per gallon fuel economy at 100 miles per hour or faster.

· April 7: Peter H. Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which promotes the formation of space tourism and other major milestones and the co-Founder of Space Adventures. 

· April 7: Michael Schrage– Research fellow with the Sloan School of Management’s Center for Digital Business and a visiting fellow at Imperial College’s London ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ program.