OFC Meeting 7

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10 July 2018:

The Future of Transportation

Moderator: Jess H. Brewer

I will give a brief introduction to the subject (problems & possible innovative solutions for transportation in the next 20 years), posit some of my own theories, pose a few questions, and then turn the floor over to the group.

Feel free to prepare a brief presentation of your own on your favourite aspects of the topic. You may want to post a condensed version here to get us up to speed; here's mine:

THE ISSUES:

It occurs to me that "TRANSPORTATION" encompasses a number of issues that don't necessarily overlap; I hope to keep these all in mind as I step through PAST, PRESENT, NEAR FUTURE and DISTANT FUTURE schemes below.

  • ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS of Transportation include pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, paving of arable land, wildlife "roadkill" and blockage of migration routes.
  • PERSONAL Transportation is defined as individuals' requirements to get from one place to another by themself. Walking and bicycling are ideal for young healthy people, but they have limited range, take longer and offer no protection against the weather. Also we are becoming less young and healthy.
  • PUBLIC Transportation is when a number of people share the same technology to get from one place to another together. Too many people view this as demeaning. Attitudes need to change.
  • LOCAL Transportation is like when you need to get to work, the grocery store or a movie. This probably accounts for the majority of fuel consumption in North America.
  • LONG DISTANCE Transportation is like when you go on vacation to someplace warm in mid-Winter.

THE PAST:

Wouldn't it be nice...

... if the Good Roads Movement (started by American bicycle enthusiasts in the 1880s) had not led to the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 which in turn led to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the paving over of nearly 1% of the total land area of the contiguous 48 states? We could've had decent railroads instead, like most of Europe.

... if someone had forseen the logical consequences of millions of randomly selected idiots hurtling past each other in two-ton steel chariots at 100 kph in opposite directions? The motor vehicle fatality rate now accounts for about 1.4% of all deaths in the USA each year.

... if we had continued to develop dirigibles for air travel after the Hindenburg disaster?

Oh well.

THE PRESENT:

In 2015 there were 90,780,583 motor vehicles produced in the world. With a population of about 7.6 billion people, that's about 1.2 new cars per year for every 1000 people. The birth rate worldwide is 18.5 babies per year per 1000 people and the death rate is 7.8 per year per 1000 people, so we are increasing our own numbers by 10.7 people per year per 1000 people -- almost ten times as fast as we are making new cars. Whew! We're still ahead of our cars, for the time being....

For those who decry air travel, you should be aware that the fuel economy in airliners is more than twice as good as that of the average passenger car; so don't even think about driving across country to "save fuel".

Breaking News -- A recent paper on cancer rates of airline flight attendants showed that their cosmic radiation dose (from flying above most of our protective blanket of atmosphere) is significant and does cause cancer. The dose rate varies from place to place on Earth and can get as high as 40 times the sea-level dose rate. So maybe there's a legitimate reason to avoid air travel? Nah. Nothing to worry about. See Radiation Hazards.

Focusing on the interface between the Present and the Near Future, many proposals (see the References below) involve more use of improved rail or highways; but today we don't seem to be able to maintain our existing infrastructure. Bridges are on the verge of collapse all over North America; highways are barely navigable in many places; and existing railroads are being shut down for lack of maintenance -- viz. the now-unused railroad up the East coat of Vancouver Island, whose right-of-way could be used for a Skytrain-like service with stations within bicycle range of most of the population of the Island. But no one is even proposing such a replacement for the convoy of speeding pickup trucks on Highway 19....

THE NEAR FUTURE:

Hybrid electric/fossil fuel vehicles (including "pure electric" cars in most places where the electricity comes from fuel-burning power plants) offer a fuel efficiency 2-3 times better than gas or diesel alone. This helps, but not enough. Electrical power generation in general must get "greener" with solar, wind and nuclear.

Self-driving cars are the key to reducing the number of massive Strassenkreutzers carrying solitary drivers. Once the pleasure of driving is reduced, people may be glad to be picked up and delivered by tiny, efficient, automated vehicles. Bus service can also be improved and expanded.

Elon's Hyperloop: Elon Musk and SpaceX have proposed to build an evacuated 350-mile (560 km) tube down which a mag-lev capsule will travel at a speed of 760 mph (1,200 km/h), allowing for a travel time of 35 minutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The tube would follow roughly the same route as US Highway 5. Cool.

Ultimately, however, we really need to give up traveling so compulsively.

THE DISTANT FUTURE:

The Lofstrom Launch Loop (see video) is intended for launching spacecraft directly and efficiently into or bit as a mag-lev capsule in an evacuated tunnel with "active support" from the momentum of circulating high-speed projectiles, but it might also be used as an alternative to conventional air travel. The energy economics have not yet been worked out.

The Tunnel Train: A classic Physics homework problem asks what would happen if a tunnel could be dug (it can't!) from the North Pole straight through the center of the Earth to the South Pole, evacuated, and you dropped in a capsule. Pretending that the Earth is a sphere of uniform density (it isn't, but it's not too far off), we can easily calculate using Gauss' Law that the acceleration of gravity inside the Earth is proportional to the distance from the center. That's equivalent to a linear restoring force -- i.e. a spring! So the capsule will accelerate downwards at a decreaing rate until it reaches the center of the Earth, and then decelerate at an increasing rate until it appears at the other Pole, at rest, in roughly 42 minutes.

Even if we could make such a tunnel, there's not much call for travel between the Poles; and any other straight line through the center of the Earth would suffer Coriolis forces seeming to push the capsule sideways; these, however, could be counteracted by a mag-lev suspension system like that of the proposed Hyperloop. Too bad we can't make a tunnel through the center of the Earth.

But wait! A less-known extension of that homework problem can show that any chord through the Earth (a straight line between two points) will also yield the same effect with the same 42-minuite transit time. There may be some places where the crust is thick enough to make such a tunnel feasible. Except for the costs of keeping the air out and maintaining the mag-lev system (surely using lossless superconductors), this form of transportation costs nothing at all. The Shinkansen "bullet train" can cover about 70 miles in 42 minutes, so a 70 mile "chord tunnel" would be like a free bullet train ride. By my calculations, such a chord would reach a maximum depth of only 248.7 m, which I'm sure we could manage. A tunnel with a maximum depth of 1 km would connect endpoints 140 miles apart in the same 42 minutes.

Let's do it!

REFERENCES

Here are a few URLs that I got from Googling "transportation future":

From Philip:

Two topics of interest to me:

  1. How likely is that we will make a transition to shared self-driving transportation? How do we handle going on errands, taking the dog or quick trips to the store.
  2. How do we avoid using motorized transport of any kind? Possible ways of doing so would be through densification and relaxed zoning leading to more walkable cities, and more virtual commuting.

Comment by Jess: A friend of my son is scheming to build one of these "high-tech eco-villages" on Gambier Island. They also have plans for a pretty exotic way to get back and forth from Gambier to Vancouver.

PS: I just received an email from Greyhound Canada that they are cancelling all service in Western Canada as of Oct this year. I guess the provincial government may provide subsidies and/or other companies may step in. But very sad.

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