Autonomous-Ways, or A-Ways, Part 2 – A Vision for the Future

For a vision of the future I decided to start from basic requirements: if you were upgrading highways, what sorts of things would you want to achieve?

1. It should take you wherever and whenever you want to go
2. It should be inexpensive to build and operate 
3. It should be fast door-to-door, certainly faster than today’s cars, and hopefully much faster
4. It should be safe and reliable
5. It should be non-polluting, including noise and “visual pollution”
6. It should serve all our transportation needs
7. It should have a reasonable transition from our current system of roads, cars, and trucks
8. It should be expandable to handle future traffic growth and future technologies
9. It should enable equality for people who are mobility challenged: including youth, seniors, and the poor – that’s more than 50% of the population!
10. Since the vehicle is Autonomous, you should be free to do whatever you want while in transit :-)

I imagine that you think those are mutually exclusive, and that this sort of solution is unobtainable. Building new highways costs millions of dollars per mile, or even billions, and most of the land is already used.

Well, I think we can come pretty close to meeting all of those, and I think you will be surprised. Let me try to convince you that we can do it. Some of the things I’m proposing may sound a bit far out, but bear with me because there are a lot of pieces to this approach and you may need to see many of them before it all clicks into place.

Some Autonomous Vehicles will move among people, such as the Autonomous versions of wheelchairs. Others will move hidden in the walls, sort of like dumb waiters, as I mentioned earlier Keeping Autonomous Vehicles Away from People, and Integrating A-Ways Into Buildings. These are relatively slow-moving and don’t need high speed A-Ways, and although they may displace some uses of cars, they aren’t what you think of when you consider cars, so I won’t talk about them more here.

One major problem is that we pave over a lot of prime territory for roads and parking: 61,000 square miles, bigger than Georgia, and that’s ¾ of the total area we have planted in wheat. They are ugly, noisy, smelly, and take up space we need for other things. In some US cities 1/3 of the land area is paved for parking lots – the most salient feature of development. Estimates are 8 parking spaces for each car.

What if we could use the Autonomous-Way area for other things as well? If we’re going to enclose it anyway, we could put things on top of it. How about factories and businesses? They all need access to good transportation. What about residences? They want to be close to services, employment, and transportation.

Where could we possibly find the land for such new structures? How about right on top of existing highways – the land is already dedicated to public use. Most places would welcome replacing the noisy, smelly roads with clean, quiet, multi-purpose structures.

What if we included the other utilities in the same system? Rather than paying to separately bury pipes and wires, often digging up the roads in the process and leaving them a mess, or festooning the shoulders with poles and wires, which get ruined by trees and weather. This is how it is done in some subways and tunnels, where pipes and conduits are along the side of the tunnel. In future posts I’ll say a lot more about the advantages of this approach, but for now, consider that it would be easy to install, maintain, repair, upgrade and remove all of the utilities if they are in readily accessible, enclosed space. This would allow us to expand capacity as needed, and allow new technologies to be economically deployed, freeing us from dependence on decades-old, outdated technologies.

I’ve watched a 2 block long section of a rural, residential street being completely ripped up for 4 weeks last year and 3 weeks again this year trying to fix pipe leaks. Super Storm Sandy wrecked both above-ground and below-ground utilities causing both long outages and horrendous costs. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates an additional $3.6 trillion needed for infrastructure by 2020.
 

Now you may be thinking of the noise associated with subways, with wheels squealing, and ground shaking, but newer technologies can fix that – the Montreal Metro (subway) is very quiet, and its going on 50 years old. Like the proposed A-Way, the Montreal Metro runs only in protected tunnels.

I don’t intend to get into specifying transportation technologies, in part because I believe this will be an area for major innovations as technologies advance. However, I decided to do a simple design exercise to give some ideas of what might be possible.

Consider an “Autonomous Air Vehicle” or AAV, which uses air cushions for “lift”, sort of like air-hockey games, and somewhat like a hover vehicle with the AAV generating the air cushion. With this technology there is no contact between the AAV and the A-Way. The load is spread uniformly across the whole bottom of the AAV rather than focused on the contact points at the wheels – thus we may have loads of a few pounds per square-inch, rather than tons per square-inch, a factor of 100-1,000 reduction. This virtually eliminates wear, and eliminates heavy and expensive wheels, springs, and suspension systems. This also greatly reduces noise and vibration, consistent with our approach for eliminating pollution in all its many forms.

How do you propel an AAV? The obvious approach is to use air propulsion, as most hovercraft do.  How do you steer an AAV? Hovercraft use mechanisms like rudders in the air stream. However, the A-Way provides a very convenient environment for the AAV: no winds, the curves can be banked, and the walls can be used for guidance. We could even use air cushions on the sides for guidance.

At this point I won’t go into more detail, but I’ll include some figures to give you ideas of how this might work. I don’t pretend that this is a complete design, or even that it is desirable, rather it’s to spark ideas of how innovation and new technologies can yield major improvements in all aspects of transportation.

In future posts I’ll say more about how we can transition to these A-Ways, both as new-starts, and as over-builds.

But next I want to go on to Autonomous Actors – devices and systems that use Autonomous technology for applications other than just transportation.

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