My name is Yana and
the other one is Meggan.
And we met at school, at the KADK [The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts]
and we started to, like, work together
there for half a year.
And I'm Meggan and I studied alongside Yana at KADK.
And we both have a similar background in terms of working
as architects in Denmark, in Copenhagen,
Copenhagen wanted to become carbon neutral by 2025.
And since the CO2 emissions, just from the transport sector,
are like 12% of the whole CO2 emissions
within Copenhagen's municipality, we saw that there's a huge potential to
look into that and how we can decrease
those CO2 emissions for the city.
The project was looking at alternative ways of dealing with the last mile issue.
So, typically, the last mile is
the last mile within the city of where
the goods are delivered to the consumer.
The project focuses primarily on
the least efficient and most polluting part of the journey of a package.
So the idea was to take the goods
from a hub,
which sits on the outskirts of the city,
into the infrastructure of the Metro system and the tunnels
and utilizing that infrastructure
to get parcels around the city like,
as if it's veins, in a way, into the city.
So, for example, when you first come into the city,
you have a distribution hub,
where packages get dropped off by a standard truck.
These enter the metro system, almost like veins, where
they actually relieve the pressure from the streets above.
These goods are transported through the city all the way to
Metro stations, where they are unloaded
and then often picked up by the consumer
and spread out into the city.
And I think, especially when you look at Copenhagen's
Metro system – it's like a system, which is like, on development.
And, at the moment, there's, basically, from every point within the city,
in a 600 meter radius, you always reach a Metro station,
which made it kind of like a key
point within the city,
which was super reachable from every location.
And also, on the other hand, the Metro is primarily a
transport means for passengers
commuting to work or commuting to the city.
So that means that, basically, there's a huge window from, like –
from the morning rush hour, when that's over
to, like, the afternoon rush hour,
there's a huge time potential, which can be actually used,
as well as, like, during night time,
which is – especially when you look at logistics and how they kind of work –
you kind of have a lot of deliveries going overnight.
Because that is the times, basically, when also the roads are empty
and you don't have that many congestions.
So, the Copenhagen Metro was like the
perfect solution for us, for our
idea of, like, hacking that system and reducing the CO2 emissions.
Another thing about it was that during peak hours
the Metro is going, like, basically every two minutes.
But during off peak hours,
it's actually only going every four minutes or every eight minutes.
So there is the potential to just add this extra train in between.
Like, that wouldn't require any more tracks or anything
because the tracks are already able to carry that throughout the day.
In order to actually get the amount of packages that we need into the city and around the city,
you actually have to introduce a completely new parcel train
that during peak time would work as a passenger train as normal – it would just have no seats.
And then during off peak hours, it would work primarily as a cargo train.
So the design and everything is exactly the same as the trains we have today.
It's just the seats are only the folding down seats.
And you don't have the standard set seats that you have today.
We actually collaborated with the Metro company and we discussed this, so
during peak hours, a lot of people have to stand anyway.
So these trains would actually allow even more people on because you don't have the –
you're not using up the space for the seating.
If Copenhagen really wants to become carbon neutral by 2025,
this is the thing that they really need to start considering.
But with the likes of New York, for example,
Amazon is already sending
their carriers onto the subway system.
And that's because they can't see another way to get to the consumer quick enough.
So then, the subway system is actually being exploited
by Amazon already.
So if you could actually get the government or the city to realize this
and actually say, "Hey, but you can get ahead of these companies
and actually implement something that is greener."
They would be silly not to do it.