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Drone Taxicabs, Maglev Transportation Bubbles, and Peak Car
Technological advances can help us do more with less. In a new piece at the Breakthrough Institute, Jesse Ausubel argues that with better tech, a “large, prosperous, innovative humanity, producing and consuming wisely, might share the planet with many more companions, as nature rebounds.” A future of abundance, not austerity. Already we may be at Peak Farmland and Peak Timber because of efficiency and alternatives. Also, Peak Car:
The beginning of a plateau in the population of cars and light trucks on US roads suggests we are approaching peak car. The reason may be that drone taxis will win. The average personal vehicle motors about an hour per day, while a car shared like a Zipcar gets used eight or nine hours per day, and a taxi even more. Driverless cars could work tirelessly and safely and accomplish the present mileage with fewer vehicles. The manufacturers won’t like it, but markets do simply fade away, whether for typewriters or newsprint.
Moreover, new forms of transport can enter the game. According to our studies, the best bet is on magnetically levitated systems, or maglevs, “trains” with magnetic suspension and propulsion. Elon Musk has proposed a variant called the hyperloop that would speed between Los Angeles and San Francisco at about 1,000 kilometers per hour, accomplishing the trip in about 35 minutes and thus comfortably allowing daily round trips, if the local arrangements are also quick.
The maglev is a vehicle without wings, wheels, and motor, and thus without combustibles aboard. Suspended magnetically between two guardrails that resemble an open stator of an electric motor, it can be propelled by a magnetic field that runs in front and drags it.
Hard limits to the possible speed of maglevs do not exist, if the maglev runs in an evacuated tunnel or surface tube. Evacuated means simulating the low pressure that an airplane encounters at 30 to 50 thousand feet of altitude or higher. Tunnels solve the problem of permanent landscape disturbance, but tubes mounted above existing rights of way of roads or rails might prove easier and cheaper to build and maintain.
Spared a motor and the belly fat called fuel, the maglev could break the “rule of the ton,” the weight rule that has burdened mobility. The weight of a horse and its gear, a train per passenger, an auto that on average carries little more than one passenger, and a jumbo jet at takeoff all average about one ton of vehicle per passenger. The maglev could slim to 300 kilograms per passenger, dropping directly and drastically the cost of energy transport.
Will maglevs make us sprawl? This is a legitimate fear. In Europe, since 1950, the tripling of the average speed of travel has extended personal area tenfold, and so Europe begins to resemble Los Angeles. In contrast to the car, maglevs may offer the alternative of a bimodal or “virtual” city with pedestrian islands and fast connections between them. Maglevs can function as national- and continental-scale metros, at jet speed.
Looking far into the 21st century, we can imagine a system as wondrous to today’s innovators as our full realization of cars and paved roads would seem to the maker of the Stutz Bearcat. Because the maglev system is a set of magnetic bubbles moving under the control of a central computer, what we put inside is immaterial. It could be a personal or small collective vehicle, starting as an elevator in a skyscraper, becoming a taxi in the maglev network, and again becoming an elevator in another skyscraper. The entire bazaar could be run as a videogame where shuffling and rerouting would lead the vehicle to its destination swiftly, following the model of the Internet. In the end, a maglev system is a common carrier or highway, meaning that private as well as mass vehicles can shoot through it.
Along somewhat similar lines, I discussed the idea of Peak Traffic with David Levinson, awhile back.
Published in Economics
I’m sure it’ll be great, but I wouldn’t propose this for a few months.
We just had a disaster where people died on a train that was going too fast. Let the people forget that, and then maybe we’ll talk …
If we get really truly self-driving cars, why would anyone ever again use any kind of mass-transit system? Who cares if it takes a couple hours to get between two cities (at 100-plus MPH) if you can be doing something else besides driving and avoid the unwashed masses?
People who can’t/don’t want to drive right now will get self-driving cars to carry them around.
And if you’re going to be able to do something else besides driving, the last thing you’re going to want to do is share a vehicle with a bunch of strangers a la zipcar. You’re going to want to be able to keep your own private diversions in your personal car instead of carrying them with you when you exit. Your car will essentially become a portable living room/bedroom.
Self-driving cars will lead to [many] more cars, not fewer.
Yeah but that was a system controlled by a human. Humans are really bad at operating vehicles. We crash things all time. We crash trains, planes, and automobiles at an astounding rate. I predict now that someday my grandkids (if I a so blessed) will ask me if it was true that over 100 people used to die every day in car crashes?
Frankly I think a lot of people would love to not own a car. Owning a car is a hassle. You have to repair it, you have to clean it, you have to insure it, you have to fill it with fuel for crying out loud. I’ll bet a steak dinner at the nicest steakhouse house in a town of our mutual choosing that in 30 years the vast majority of cars will be self-driving and we will well on our way (if not already there) to a model where the vast majority of people living in the big cities (let’s say any city over 500,000) will participate in some sort of pay by the mile model as opposed to owning their own vechile.
I love trains (except for my state’s insanely willful insistence on high speed rail between two cities that don’t need it), but they are more vulnerable to terrorist disruption than cars or even planes.
(The next time nightly news does a story on California high speed rail, note that they’ll invariably use a video clip of a jam on fourteen-lane-wide Interstate 10, which runs in L.A. county, not the actual road that runs between L.A. and the Bay Area, Interstate 5, four lanes wide and mostly empty.)
The hyperloop depends on CERN-like utter smoothness; the interior walls of the tube can’t vary even a millimeter in a mile (sure, those are inconsistent measurements; how about “one twenty fifth of an inch in a kilometer”?) for 400 miles. If the power goes off, even fractionally for a moment, the vehicle touches the walls at upwards of speed of sound, unprotected against friction. Above all, the human body can’t take the acceleration/deceleration that parts on a fast assembly line can take; these prospective 200 mile an hour shifts from horizontal to vertical would liquefy the passengers.
Count me in there. But …
I grew up near Philadelphia, and I took trains and subways and public transportation all of my life. The basic problem, of course, is that it’s mass transit, which means that it’s not built for you personally. That means before you take advantage of all the benefits, you have to find some way to get to the system’s common entry point (a station or bus stop), so it only makes sense within a dense city. If you need a car just to get to the station … you wind up with all the car payments and gas bills anyway, so why bother?
Because you will pay $1 a mile (or even less probably) to have the car come pick you up and drop you off. You won’t pay for gas, repairs, auto insurance, or car payments, oh and you can turn your garage into that mancave or workshop you always wanted. You will never have to arrange for a friend to pick you up when you are headed for the airport. You will never be late to work because your batteries died or because you back backed over a nail the night before. It will be the ultimate in convenience.
So long as you want to stay within the city limits of major airports, yeah.
Yes I will admit it will take a critical mass of people to make this work. That’s why I said in my prediction this will probably only happen in cities with greater than 500,0000 people.
But think about it. I have to be at work at 7. The car comes and picks me up and drops me off. Then it picks up the middle school teach who doesn’t have to be into the office till 7:45. Then the car goes and picks up the guy that works in the city and drops him off there at 9. Then it picks up someone to take them shopping or drops by the office of a field working tech guy and drives him around during the day. Then once it has dealt with the going home from work rush it takes people out on the city. The point is it will be very convenient and the fleet required to service the population will be vastly reduced.
I wonder what will become of the automotive enthusiast in the future? At some point will the government mandate that all new cars have a self-driving mode, thereby killing off the manual transmission for good? Will they then go on to forbid use of driver-driving mode on public streets and roads? Will the sports car enthusiast be the 21st century equivalent of the horse rider, still in existence but miniscule in number and relegated to driving on private property only? I love most of the new technology in cars but I worry about a day when new cars will universally be transportation appliances and fun-to-drive cars will be historical artifacts.
I can’t deny that it would be convenient, but from where I’m looking at it, it would only really work for a certain subset of people, even in large cities. I live in Charleston, SC. If you add in the surrounding towns you’re going to get to about 500,000, maybe a little more and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work here (too spread out I think). I know it wouldn’t work for me and a lot of the people I work with. They have to have their own car that stuff can be carried and left in but isn’t a van. On top of that there are a lot of folks whose lives aren’t that scheduled and they need a vehicle at random times and don’t have time to wait for a drone car to come and get them when it becomes available. That said I have no doubt it could replace cabs in NY or other high density cities. However, even if drone cars become ubiquitous there will still be a lot of private ownership.
Well yah, but it wasn’t designed to go that fast under those conditions.
Frankly, I am dubious about all potential “train” projects. In America today they all seem to turn into massive government boondoggles. Further more the greatest hindrance to infrastructure development is environmentalists demanding eco-impact studies on every inch of rail and road. And let us not forget that any government construction contract will just be a milk cow to some shady union. Basically this magrail I think has a large initiation cost associated with it, at least here in the US.
1967MustangMan, I knocked Cal High Speed Rail, but I have nothing against driverless cars being used as autonomous taxis.
The Nixon administration put money into experimental projects like Morgantown, WV. I’ve always been a fan of Personal Rapid Transit ideas, and until our era, it’s almost always been proposals for tracked systems–theme park tech applied to suburban loops near “real” (monorail, light rail, or subway) backbone mass transit. There were suggestions even in the Seventies that a PRT vehicle could leave the rails and drive on specially prepared streets for short range.
Much of the benefit described for cyber taxis exists because they’re taxis–they aren’t privately owned cars, or the benefits disappear. So they’re owned by the city, or the homeowner’s association, or other public entity, and the questions of procurement, upkeep and depreciation become policy issues. (Were these seats woven of cruelty-free materials? How many women overhaul the motors?) That doesn’t bother us if a city has 400 buses; when it supervises 40,000 autotaxis it might be different.
Also, demand management doesn’t come free of stress. Despite the 24 hour workplace, flex time and telecommuting, most people still have to work during the “sun cycle”, so there’ll be a need to have huge amounts of vehicles pre-positioned for morning and afternoon rush hour. How about New Year’s Eve, when everybody wants to go home at one or two? Unless your town goes crazy with buying them, prudent buying tends to lop off the top end of the demand curve, so you might wait a long time for your robot ride. These aren’t reasons not to do it; they’re reasons why the transition can be politically and socially messy.
Maybe but remember we are assuming that cars will still and look like what they look like today. Multi-user vehicles could easily handle this kind of thing and it wouldn’t have to be like riding a bus you could build in multiple pods or even have large compartments for large parties. The point is this will eventually change everything. Transportation will no longer need to be 2-15 people sitting next to each other all facing the direction of travel.
Walt Disney’s original ideas for EPCOT envisioned suburbs with narrow streets suitable for neighborhood electric vehicles (basically, golf carts with doors) and small delivery vans. Neighborhood shopping centers would be accessible by night time truck delivery over wider, conventional roads.
Neighborhoods would be linked to each other by monorail.
Private cars would still exist, but Disney’s planners expected them to be rarer and more expensive, somewhere between the present-day cost of a tricked-out Corvette or 7-series BMW and a small private airplane. Like private planes, they’d be kept at the edges of towns, ready for highway drives. Disney expected that this would be caused by market forces.
No, no, 1,000 times no. My car (below) is my Liberty, and you will have to remove it from my cold, dead hand.
This is the “flying car” of the 21st century. I won’t list all the challenges as some of the major ones have already been noted above.
I do think some sort of autonomous transit system might evolve. That would be practical in cities and denser suburbs. The other application I foresee is “driver assisted driving”. As we boomers age we will be loath to give up our cars. If you were born between 1945 and 1965 you know the truth of the statement Car = Freedom. Most of us have already experienced “the talk”, not that one. The one with Mom when you take away the car keys. A car that can be operated with fail safe rules would be quite a benefit and a top seller.
HAL, I put the car in gear but I’m not moving.
Open the garage door, Dave!
Steve C, I’m with you, and probably the rest of are, too. Provided this isn’t imposed by our planetary overlords, a lot of places would benefit from something like this. I love cars and driving, and I think 1967Mustangman’s handle speaks for itself in terms of car-friendliness, but a system with the smarts of a Uber, the user interface of a MacBook, and the cheap chic of Target should be an American natural.
Okay, let me revise my previous remarks. The peak demand problem for pricing and civic procurement could be mitigated–maybe–by privately owned fleets, competing transparently online on price, luxury, or proven on time reliability. Pirate conditions. No taxi medallions, no built-in corruption. Peak demand? Late rising private owners of self driving cars can let Uber have them as the default for a.m. early risers whenever they haven’t blocked them out, contributing to the morning rush.
I’d like to have that where I live. Yep, if you live in Oatmeal, NE, you don’t need it. This isn’t like the internet; not everyone needs to be on it.
I lived for years without a car, and last year I sent six months without one. The grass is most definitely not greener on the other side of this fence. Cars are only a hassle when you have ’em.
No takes on my steak dinner bet? I am delightful conversational partner I promise!
Musty, in 30 years I’ll be 93, not up to the job of chewing on the steak. Besides, I’m basically on your side with this. It’s our mutual job to politely examine vast changes that could have great benefits, but will certainly have great transitional expenses.
Nonetheless, I’m in favor of Solid State Motoring. We need some sort of catchy acronym that will attract attention as a Ricochet #hashtag. Something that conveys what a Scientifically Systematized Metro can bring to a community. A simple three-letter code that catches the eyes of the site’s insiders.