Tag: transportation

Airlines gone by 2060

Starting around 2030, SpaceX reusable Starship rockets will start providing a replacement for long international flights. The speed will be increased 20x. It will be anywhere in the world in 1 hour. SpaceX will be able to have 1000 people in reclined seating arrangements. The cost will be about $500-1000 per seat per flight. The key enabling factor is increasing the safety of rockets.

SpaceX success in this area would cripple the main financial strength of existing airlines. Business travel and first-class travel and international flights will be replaced with reusable rockets.

A bit more detail:

The reality of SpaceX mass production rockets is unfolding before our eyes. SpaceX Starships will cost over 10x less than current cargo planes, have over 2x the range and will be 30x faster. These massive advantages will give SpaceX dominance of the cargo business.

Not only that, they may also become price competitive by weight. Air freight is 1-5$ per KG, Starship could get to 10$ / KG to LEO, presumably less for ballistic flights. With airlines struggling in general, this could be a huge opening, and remodel the world economy for true just in time delivery.

America’s aerospace industry is regenerating:

If there ever was an example of Schumpeter’s creative destruction, this is it. Traditional aerospace companies have a hoard of capital and talent, providing poor returns to customers. Startups are siphoning the best talent and raising money. Market potential and technology are converging to create an ecosystem that looks more like the aerospace industry pre-1970, including the exploding prototypes, crazy ideas, and swarms of new companies. That aerospace industry took us from the first flight to the moon in ~65 years. The latest batch yearns to take us further.

2022-04-15: If airlines survive, here’s a look at the state of hypersonic flight.

High-speed flight is no longer a game of national prestige, subject to the whims of politics. It’s become the domain of private industry, where the technology is mature enough that entrepreneurs can focus on designs that reduce business risk. In the next decade we anticipate commercial high-speed flight will return to the market, regulations around overland sonic boom will be changed thanks to NASA’s X-59 program, and hypersonic technologies will transition from military to civilian flight. The future is faster!

Kitty Hawk Plane

Kitty Hawk showed off its latest concept—an 8-motor prototype that uses an unconventional forward-swept wing, and is purportedly 100x quieter than a conventional helicopter. The company calls it Heaviside, after noted physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who advanced a variety of theories and innovations in mathematics, electronics, and communications in the early 20th century.

Car sharing

Unless we can get Uber and Lyft and the rest to stop calling their services “rideshare,” it seems that the use of the word sharing is doomed to be ambiguous and confusing. Those I propose we just use terms like “taxi,” “ride-hail” or TNC for one, and pooling or ride pooling (and carpooling) for the other.

NYPD kills cyclists

Mayor de Blasio has previously defended the practice of ticketing cyclists in the days after a driver runs over someone. But poorly designed streets in New York—especially the wide avenues that run north and south in Manhattan like the one where Hightman was run over—often physically push cyclists out of the bike lane, or make it a less safe option than simply riding in the road. While the New York Department of Transportation has added 10s of km of bike lanes throughout the city in recent years, they are often unusable for more than 1 block or 2 at a time because of obstructions.

Electric VTOL

For trips of 100 kilometers, a fully loaded VTOL carrying 1 pilot and 3 passengers had lower greenhouse gas emissions than ground-based cars with an average vehicle occupancy of 1.54. Emissions tied to the VTOL were 52% lower than gasoline vehicles and 6% lower than battery-electric vehicles.

Airships

Giant Airships Could Be a Trillion $ Industry

Mode Cost per ton-km Typical speed (kph)
Airplane >$1 >800
Truck 15-20¢ 100
Giant Cargo Airship (projected) 5-10¢ 160
Rail 3-5¢ 100 (but with transshipment delays)
Ship/Barge ~1¢ 30

Now for the disclaimers. “Per ton-km” estimates of shipping costs always misleadingly oversimplify. Costs tend to be concentrated at transshipment points. It matters a lot whether there’s a payload for the return trip. Modes differ in reliability, and if occasional transport delays make expensive bottlenecks, it might not matter if a mode can offer cheap service and adequate speed most of the time. Handling is crucial for some cargoes, e.g., fragile or perishable ones. Sometimes space is a more binding constraint than weight, and lightweight, bulky cargoes often pay “chargeable weight” proportional to the space they occupy rather than their actual weight. Above all, not all modes go to all destinations: e.g., trucks can go wherever there’s a road, but not over bodies of water, while airplanes can cross water but can only land where there’s a port. And so forth. Logistics is complicated! As for the estimates of cost and speed for a giant cargo airship, suffice it to say, for the time being, that I do have some basis for suggesting that 160 km per hour and 5-10¢ per ton-km are attainable performance goals for a giant cargo airship, though it will take a lot of investment to get there. I’m not asking readers to trust me on that, except for the sake of argument.

2021-10-22: Airships to overcome lack of roads

Airships right now are interesting as a cost-effective substitute for less efficient cargo transportation that’s already happening. But they can be much more: one of the barriers to manufacturing exports in the developing world is that exports require infrastructure, and infrastructure generally requires spending, which needs to be funded, ideally from exports. If the fixed cost of participating in global supply chains drops, the beneficiaries will be people in the poorest parts of the world, who will have a shot at joining the global market. Transportation costs are high in the developing world, which amounts to a tax on imports and exports, benefiting no one. If countries can skip some of the expensive and time-consuming process of building road and railroad networks, and focus on ports, they can jump over a significant barrier to higher incomes.

2023-02-03: Eli Dourado does another market sizing.

Let’s say airships captured half of the 13 trillion ton-km currently served by container ships at a price of 10¢ per ton-km. That would equal $650b in annual revenue for cargo airships, notably much bigger than the $106b Boeing reports for the entire global air freight market. If one company owned the cargo airship market, taking only 50% of only the container market, it would be the biggest company in the world by revenue.

How many airships would we need to fill that demand? A lot. If each airship can carry 500 tons, cruises at 90 km/h, and is utilized 66% of the time, that adds up to 260 million ton-km per year per airship. To produce 6.5 trillion ton-km per year would require 25k such airships. This is about the number of airliners in the world today.

None of this analysis yet assumes any expansion of the market from normal growth, from the availability of a new service class, or from the ability to go point-to-point rather than shipping between existing ports. But it’s easy to imagine new trading patterns and even new companies forming because cargo airships exist. Just as Uber and Lyft massively expanded the vehicle-for-hire market, the added supply chain flexibility afforded by airships would stimulate new demand.

Micromobility

NYC DOT data mines Uber and Lyft Trips

New York will start clawing in the same kind of data from the ride-hailing companies that have stormed its streets in recent years. If Uber, Lyft, Via, and Juno want to keep operating in the city, they’ll have to provide the TLC with even more finely detailed data than they do now: the date, time, and location of pickups and drop-offs (at least down to the intersection), the vehicle’s license number, the trip mileage, itemized trip fare, route (including whether the vehicle entered traffic-choked Midtown), and how much the driver was paid. The city intends to use all this data to learn more about what’s happening on the streets, and to plan. It will ponder how to beat traffic and improve road safety.

2019-02-05: Massive growth in bikeshare

The rate of the industry’s growth is no joke. The global explosion of shared bikes and scooters in the past few years amounts to the “the fastest technological adoption in history,” as the event’s website noted. And it’s just getting started. “Logarithmic is the way to go with everything” explained Micromobility Conference founder Horace Dediu. He pointed to charts showing the expected rise in adoption of shared electric scooters and their 1-to-3-wheeled brethren. “If you’re not measuring in logarithmic, you’re in the wrong business.” In the meantime, the mini-vehicle gold rush will likely keep beckoning new prospectors. 2 former employees of the traditional docked bikeshare operator Motivate, now both working at 2 new-mobility startups, reminisced about old times maintaining New York City’s hardy CitiBike fleet. They complained that all the sudden interest from software startups was leaving critical hardware overlooked. A former manager pointed to the apparently fragile wheel hubs on a competitor’s shared bike model. “We tried those. They’re just not going to last.”

2019-05-08: The segway was too early but was otherwise correct

This transformation is one that Dean Kamen trumpeted when introducing the Segway in 2001 — the Segway will “sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking” — but the Segway was too early and expensive and now e-scooters and e-bikes are actually set to deliver on that promise

2019-08-12: Tiny cars

Minimobility vehicles will use more energy and road space than scooters, but still much less than full sized cars and transit systems. Expect to see energy numbers perhaps 33%-50%, though it is possible to do even less. Minimobility vehicles will take 50-25% the space on roads of human driven sedans. Many are only 2.5m long and thus fit perpendicular in parallel parking spaces as motorcycles do. That’s cool, but even better is the ability of computer-driven cars to valet park, fitting 5 in the space used by 1 human driven sedan. (You can also fit 10s of small micromobility scooters in a sedan’s parking space.)

2019-08-24: Similarly in LA

Los Angeles will deploy a massive surveillance dragnet targeting the less than menacing threat posed by…bikes and scooters. That’s right, a city-wide, real-time tracking network, a veritable Orwellian surveillance state, targeting the same sort of scooters popular with middle schoolers. In a perplexing technical document posted by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to the open-source software development site GitHub, the city laid-out its vision for an unprecedented tracking system. Buried between technical jargon like “All MDS compatible provider APIs must expose a public GBFS feed…” is a terrifying vision of the future. Under these guidelines, every scooter and bike will need to report the exact GPS coordinates of each device with military precision every 5 seconds. Even worse, the devices will have to report this data in real time.

2022-12-14: More on tiny cars

Why do minicars offer so much societal upside? Let’s walk through the reasons.
To start, they pose far less danger than automobiles to pedestrians and cyclists, whose deaths have been soaring in the US. It’s easy to understand why: If forced to choose, you’d rather be hit by a 500kg golf cart puttering along at 30 kmh than a 3500kg Chevrolet Silverado going 70kmh.
Minicars are better for the planet, too, devouring much less energy and resources for propulsion and manufacture. Their batteries are a fraction of those underpinning electric SUVs and trucks. A Hummer EV’s battery weighs 1500kg, 30x the size of Nimbus’s battery pack. Smaller batteries require less lithium, cobalt and nickel — essential minerals whose shortages have hobbled electric vehicle manufacturing. Even a modest shift toward miniature EVs would free up precious material, catalyzing the transition from fossil fuels.
Minicars also expand mobility access, in two ways. Most obviously, their lower prices put them within reach of those who struggle to afford a full-sized car. But slower minicars, such as golf carts, offer another key advantage. Because most operators don’t need to pedal (or, in some states, possess a driver’s license), they offer mobility to those physically unable to drive a car or ride a bike. That’s an especially valuable capability in a country with soaring numbers of older people.