Because of the steadily decreasing price/performance ratios of our tunneling technologies, the increasing intelligence and cleanliness of our automobiles, and the ever increasing social value of our spare time, some overcrowded city (LA? NY?) will eventually decide to put a nice, long AHS express tube underground, creating a fast connection between 2 important and yet informationally different urban cores, at the same time bypassing the most gridlocked sections of the city. Only certified, AHS-equipped, electric vehicles will be allowed into these underground connector tubes. Want Speed? Get Intelligent and Go Green.
if you really need suburbia, at least but all roads into tunnels. should be cost-effective soon.
Route optimization software can save substantial fuel for trucks and airplanes.
Many look to alternative fuels and hybrid-electric vehicles. But information technology has an important role to play in making existing vehicles more efficient, particularly when it comes to aggregating small gains across large fleets. Take something as simple as reducing left-hand turns. For US drivers, this means less time idling in the middle of the road waiting for oncoming traffic to pass. Collectively, Roadnet clients save an estimated 205m liters of fuel a year and can cut 85k trucks and cars out of their logistics systems.
2013-07-26: What Was a Truck Driver? The US commercial truck fleet has 253m trucks, and employs 5.7m truck drivers. Within 20 years, that should go down to 0 drivers. 2014-05-30: Software truck convoys. This kind of mundane driverless car will be on the road very soon, already saves 10% fuel and can save up to 20% if the distance is further reduced.
Across China, 7.2m trucks and 16m drivers are responsible for intercity transportation of goods. This industry is worth $300b, and drivers account for 40% of the costs. Some long-distance trips across China require 3 drivers to complete. The truck freight industry in the US is even bigger, valued at $700b.
Amazon is building an app that matches truck drivers with shippers, a new service that would deepen its presence in the $800B trucking industry. The app is designed to make it easier for truck drivers to find shippers that need goods moved. It would also eliminate the need for a third-party broker, which typically charges a commission of ~15% for doing the middleman work.
In 2022, that figure is 3m truck tractors on the road. From there, we can estimate the average yearly net transactions per truck at $340k per year. Multiply the 2 numbers together, and we get $1.04t!
Trucking is a potpourri of different services and needs. There’s drayage: the process of moving containers from docks to warehouses. There’s reefer (refrigerated truck): the truck trailer is temperature controlled. There’s hazmat: transport of hazardous materials. Flatbed, dry van, tankers, partials, hotshots, box trucks, and more.
Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65b project to supply the US with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia. The project would take 15 years to complete. A 6000-kilometer transport corridor from Siberia into the US will feed into the tunnel, which at 100 km will be more than 2x as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel.
CO2 emissions from shipping are 2x those of aviation and could rise by 75% in the next 15-20 years which will have a serious impact on global warming.
time for those humongous sails on tankers and container ships. 2020-02-04: Removing CO2 from transportation is going to be really difficult around the world due to NIMBYs.
There are a number of headwinds to the replacement of cars with public transportation, all of which are politically or technically nontrivial in ways that mass installation of solar and wind power isn’t:
Public transport is the most convenient in large cities and least convenient in rural areas, but modern nationalism holds the rural to be more authentic and moral. Thus, when rural motorists riot the state is paralyzed with inaction and the media urges understanding of populist anger at elites, whereas when urbanites riot the state immediately engages in mass arrests and the media urges law and order.
The pace of urban redevelopment is too low, thanks to local NIMBYism, making it hard for people to live in cities where car-free living is already convenient. Local housing activism always focuses on people already present; Berlin passed a new rent control law that is projected to reduce investment by 25%. Even Paris, which is building more housing, is doing so almost exclusively in the suburbs and not in the city proper.
Local notables tend to drive even controlling for income and social class. One does not become a local notable by working at a city center office with people from many neighborhoods, many of whom are recent migrants to the city, but by staying within one neighborhood and interacting with old-timers. The latter kind of economic and social network is less convenient to travel by train. Thus, the loudest voices in a local discussion are against seizing space from cars and giving it to pedestrians, cyclists, buses, or trams.
At low levels of public investment, the car will predominate, for 2 reasons. First, some state action is needed to give buses priority on roads. Second, public transportation has more moving parts that must be integrated – fares, schedules, infrastructure, equipment, development. This makes fiscal austerity a drag on the ability of a developed society to demotorize unless this austerity specifically takes the form of very high taxes on cars and fuel.
A political process that slows down investment in order to mollify NIMBY opposition makes it very hard to shift priorities on the ground. In this sense, the freeway revolts and the changes they led to are the best thing that ever happened to car culture, even more than the freeways themselves; in the American context, the revolts happened largely only when the freeways intruded on middle-class neighborhoods.
2020-04-02: Ships are 3% of global emissions, and because it’s “only” 90k ships, easier to upgrade. The proper solution would be safe nuclear reactors, but of course we can’t have that due to paranoia.
Sustainable space exploration will require appropriate interplanetary supply-chain management. Unlike Apollo, where everything was carried along, future exploration will have to rely on a complex supply-chain network on the ground and in space. The primary goal of the Interplanetary Supply Chain Management and Logistics Architectures (IPSCM&LA) project is to develop a comprehensive SCM framework and planning tool for space logistics.
“In the spring issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, Michael Kleber, a topologist at MIT, waxed enthusiastic about [the interchange’s] ‘non-trivial braiding‘: while it is possible to just lift I-95 up and away from I-695, the northbound lane of I-95 braids both over, and then under, the southbound lane, making it impossible to pull them apart without cutting one of the lanes.” This leads me to wonder, of course, if you could take-over the US Department of Transportation, and rebuild the nation’s highway infrastructure as a massive textbook in driveable knot theory.
An ad-hoc gathering people passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC.
community action, i love it. we need this for all metros. 2008-02-20: And for the Bay area, though one of their big headlines is “carpooling from the east bay”. how ironic.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 