Chinese High-Speed Trains Demonstrate Power of New Paradigms in Transportation

Several recent articles present strong support for the concepts I have been describing of using new modes of transportation to improve efficiency, productivity and pollution. As the articles note, the situation in the US is different from China, but that’s why my proposals are different, moving on to the next generation of transportation technology beyond the “conventional” high-speed trains and subways.

Improved transit speed provides access to a greater labor pool, larger markets, and enhances competition.

The World Bank report describes why improving transportation speed improves productivity, with impacts equal to the conventional benefits of reduced travel time, etc. The report also describes differences between developed and developing economies, with a focus on China’s new High-Speed Rail installations.

The World Finance article provides a history and compares the size of high-speed rail networks in major countries.

The NY Times article expands on the World Bank description of specifics on the China high-speed rail impacts.

I will include sample results from each article, but they are worth reading in their entirety.

High-Speed Rail, Regional Economics, and Urban Development in China, Andrew Salzberg, Richard Bullock, Ying Jin, and Wanli Fang, World Bank Office, Beijing, China Transport Topics No.08, January 2013, 74736:

“Traditional economic evaluations of major transport infrastructure investments focus on the direct costs and benefits arising from travel, including user time savings, operator cost savings, and reductions in externalities including air pollution, noise, and accidents. There is an emerging consensus that major transport investments may have significant impacts that are not well captured by this type of conventional cost-benefit analysis. In China, the World Bank Transport team has supported both econometric studies and on-the-ground surveys that begin to identify and quantify these impacts in the context of China’s emerging high speed rail (HSR) program. Based on this and other research, the Bank team has begun to pilot a methodology to evaluate wider economic development benefits for several HSR projects, and has found them to be significant - of the same order as, but additional to the direct transport benefits that are traditionally measured. Crucially, these benefits of larger and better connected markets accrue to businesses and individuals even when they themselves do not travel. This paper highlights this research and methodology and the policy implications related to maximizing these benefits in practice.

”All else being equal, a new business located within daily reach of such hubs will be more accessible to a larger pool of labor and other businesses, raising productivity. [UK Department for Transport (2006). Transport, Wider Economic Benefits, and Impacts on GDP.] This link is an important element of what are broadly referred to as agglomeration economies, the benefits that accrue to firms and individuals from the clustering of economic activity.

– This is significant support for my proposals, both for transportation and for the Sustainable Communities that will grow with them.

“The concept and measurement of economic mass is relatively straightforward; where research has progressed in recent years has been in identifying the relationship between the economic mass of a region and its overall level of productivity. This link is based on four propositions:

a)    economic mass rises with transport improvements;

b)  the average output of employees, and hence their wages, varies directly with economic mass, even after controlling for other variables;

c)    there are positive externalities from transport improvements which increase output for some firms independently of their use of the transport network; and

d)    this increase in output is not included in the standard evaluation of transport projects.

“A major UK study that attempted to quantify this relationship estimated that, other things being equal, a doubling of economic mass would give rise to an increase in per worker productivity of 3.5% [ Rice, P.G., A.J. Venables and E Patacchini (2006). Spatial determinants of productivity: Analysis for the regions of Great Britain.  Regional Science and Urban Economics, Vol 36, pp727-752.]. Crucially, these productivity benefits accrue to businesses and individuals even where they do not themselves travel.

– These results are for developed economies, so this study examined the results for China, a developing economy.

“Overall, the best estimates of the elasticity of productivity with respect to economic mass are over double the economy-wide results obtained in comparable studies in developed countries. The best models in our estimation so far imply that doubling economic mass would give rise to an increase of per worker productivity of 9-15%. This is higher than the consensus view from a comprehensive review of such evidence in the developed economies that such a doubling would increase productivity by an amount that ranges from 5-8% [Rosenthal, S and WC Strange (2004).  Evidence on the nature and sources of agglomeration.  Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol 85, pp377-393.].

“Benefits were calculated for the 30-year period following project completion. Direct benefits including time savings for passengers and freight, reductions in operator cost, and generated traffic, yielded net present benefits of approximately 50 billion RMB in 2009 RMB. Using the elasticity of productivity with respect to economic mass adopted above, the agglomeration benefits were estimated at 49 billion RMB (both weighed against the 2009 present value of project costs of 47.9 billion RMB, all discounted at 12%). In our analysis, then, agglomeration benefits were found on the order of (and in this case only slightly lower than) traditional project benefits."

A World Finance article The Need for high-speed rail, July 3, 2013 gives a wider, and historical  context.

 The NY Times article today, High-Speed Trains Transform China, expands on the World Bank analysis for China.

“Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is carrying nearly twice as many passengers each month as the country’s domestic airline industry. With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.

“China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering.

“For example, Chinese workers are now more productive. Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.

“Productivity gains to the economy appear to be of the same order as the combined economic gains from the usual arguments given for high-speed trains, including time savings for travelers, reduced noise, less air pollution and fuel savings, the World Bank consultants calculated.

“Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha. Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.

“'More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,...'”

“Statistics suggest that China's high-speed trains have actually proved to be one of the world's safest transportation systems so far.

“Nearly every train from Changsha station, leaving minutes apart for cities across China, is sold out, and a big expansion is already planned.

“China relocated large numbers of families whose homes lay in the path of the tracks and quickly built new residential and commercial districts around high-speed train stations.

“The new districts, typically located in inner suburbs, not downtown areas, have rapidly attracted large numbers of residents, partly because of China’s rapid urbanization. Enough farm families become city dwellers each year to fill New York City.

 “China’s success may not be easily reproduced in the West, and not just because few places can match China’s pace of urbanization. China has four times the population of the United States, and the great bulk of its people live in the eastern third of the country, an area similar in size to the United States east of the Mississippi.

“'Except for Boston to Washington, D.C., we don’t have the corridors of high population density that China has,'" said C. William Ibbs, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

“China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people.

Food-Specific Communities

“A 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that there was an 18 percent increase in food allergy between 1997 and 2007. This potentially deadly disease affects 1 in every 13 children, under 18 years of age in the U.S.” When we include food sensitivities, we’re talking about a serious problem for a substantial portion of the population. Including all allergies, it is estimated that 50 million Americans, 1 in 5, suffer from one or more types of allergy.

Symptoms of food allergies and sensitivities include everything from nasal congestion, itchy mouth, rash, upsets in all parts of the digestion system, to life-threatening anaphylactic shock. I once traveled with a colleague with a severe peanut allergy: every time we ate he had to ask whether the dishes he wanted included peanuts or were cooked in peanut oil, and often we wound up in discussions with the chef – one mistake and he would be headed to the hospital. Thus people are highly motivated to avoid the foods that cause them problems.

The people I know with significant food intolerance spend hours each day acquiring and preparing safe food. They can’t buy most prepared food – imagine having to cook everything, even condiments, from scratch. They can’t go out to restaurants – imagine if you had to fix all your own food.

Their gardens can grow more food than they need. They often cook food in batches to save time. With our food matching apps and Autonomous Transportation they could share or sell some of the food to other people with similar needs and tastes.

I predict that a new food economy will develop rapidly. It will be highly differentiated, matching the specific food needs and preferences.  Because of the high labor content, if sold in the normal food markets, prices would generally be higher than our current foods, but the quality will be much higher, and most importantly it’s food you can eat safely.

To overcome the challenges, I predict that Food-Specific Communities will form based on particular food needs and preferences. This isn’t just providing access to the raw and prepared foods to meet each individual’s needs, it’s managing the total environment. I saw a boy have a severe allergic reaction just form walking near a stand in an open air market where they were popping corn.

Who would join such a Food-Specific Community? Anyone who had a food allergy themselves, or had a family member with food allergies.

In addition to getting food you can eat safely, and a healthy environment, what are the benefits of such a community? People who like to garden or farm can grow the foods they need. People who like to cook or bake can easily access the ingredients for their specialized cooking. People who like to preserve and freeze foods can use their skills to save foods for eating and sharing later.

By providing the critical mass market for specialized foods, Food-Specific Communities make it economically feasible to grow, cook, preserve, and store foods for highly differentiated special needs.

The ease and speed of our matching apps and Autonomous Transportation will foster innovative new businesses. How about Restaurants Without Borders, RWB? 

I know people who love to cook, and one of their challenges is finding people to share their cooking with. They don’t want to run a restaurant or work in one. Now they can determine ahead of time how many people might be interested in having, for example, their corn-free curried chicken tonight at 7 pm. If, say, 12 people sign up, the cook orders the ingredients to be delivered by 4 pm from local suppliers, has a great time cooking, and then ships out the 12 dishes to wherever each person will be eating.

This can foster another innovative business, BYOF, Bring Your Own Food: they don’t cook any food, it’s all transported in from wherever the diners ordered it. The BYOF provides a particular ambiance, perhaps elegant candlelight, linen tablecloths, attentive service, and classical music. Diners order food from their choice of Restaurants Without Borders.

Now people with food allergies and sensitivities don’t have to always prepare their own food!

A major challenge with food allergies and sensitivities is that they are often hard to diagnose because we eat so many different things, and many ingredients are hidden in foods. And most doctors aren’t much help. The main process to diagnose food allergies and sensitivities is to an “elimination diet” where you avoid one or more foods and see if your symptoms disappear.

This could be another innovative new business opportunity for the Food-Specific Communities: a person can order a specific food elimination diet from the corresponding Food-Specific Community. The food can easily be shipped to the subject’s home, or if environment is important as well, the subject goes and stays in the Food-Specific Community for a time.

There is strong evidence that physical proximity stimulates creativity. Bellcore did some fascinating work on joint research creativity and productivity, showing that distance was a key measure, with 100’ reducing the joint productivity in half, and a stairway was equal to 200’ (if I recall correctly). The latest issue of Wired Magazine, 21.06, has an article on page 107 talking about these tradeoffs.

So imagine the progress in understanding and ameliorating, or even curing, food allergies and sensitivities that can come from these Food-Specific Communities. Providing common purpose, strong motivation, and constant attention with close physical proximity provide a strong impetus for innovation. I believe we will see amazing results from these Food-Specific Communities, in addition of course to happier and healthier people who live in them.

This is just the tip of the innovation iceberg. I have a wide range of ideas that I’ll discuss in future posts, both food-related and otherwise, especially building on Sustainable Communities.

Next I plan to discuss some more technical innovative ideas in how to implement Autonomous Transportation Systems, starting with a 4-Dimensional Global Map.

Food Intolerance – Roles for Autonomous Transportation

One of the major shortcomings of our food system is the unavailability of foods to meet the needs of people with specific food needs.

Last night we had friends over for dinner, and they prefer gluten-free and organic foods. Our local grocery store doesn’t carry the necessary ingredients for our dinner, so we drove 45 minutes each way to a larger grocery store to get meat and other things. I decided to try a gluten-free berry buckle with fresh blueberries. The recipe called for rice-flour, so we had to go to a specialty store to find that. The recipe also called for gluten-free baking soda, but I decided that was over the top, since fortunately our friends aren’t seriously allergic to gluten. The dinner was a success, and our friends appreciated the effort to honor their preferences.

Our Chevy Volt achieved 104 mpg, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been for the environment if we had taken our old Honda Pilot which only get 21 mpg.

We have a lot of friends with various food allergies and food sensitivities. The “big 8” food allergens affect about 15 million people in the US and account for 90% of all food allergic reactions:  milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, fish, and shellfish. This ignores the other 1.5 million people who are allergic to other foods. Food allergies cause 30,000 visits to the emergency room and over 200 deaths each year. 

Although more than 160 foods have been identified to cause food allergies in sensitive individuals, the "major food allergens" account for 90 percent of all food allergies. Allergens other than the major food allergens are not subject to FALCPA labeling requirements.

Worse, it ignores the even larger number of people who are sickened by various foods but don’t happen to produce the Immunoglobin E antibodies that are counted for “food allergies”. If you happen to be one of the affected people, but not one of the 15 million, then you don’t get much help from the food system because foods are only mandated to mention the big 8 allergens.

Some of our friends are sickened by corn. You might think that all they have to do is avoid eating corn to be safe.  But just think about how many foods list corn syrup, as a sweetener. Look at something like baking soda, and you will see cornstarch listed as an ingredient — that rules out most baked goods. Most animals raised for food are fed corn in one form or another — yes, that can sicken corn-sensitive people too. Now you start to see the magnitude of the problem.

I know one child who woke up sick because his father had returned from the movies with a piece of popcorn stuck unnoticed to his shoe. And since corn isn’t one of the big 8, it isn’t mandated to be included in food labeling.

People who have one food intolerance typically have more than one, and intolerances can change over time. There is no known cure. This makes finding foods even more challenging because of the “hidden” ingredients. And even if you find a safe food, the manufacturer may change the ingredients without warning.

So how do you deal with this life-limiting situation? 40% of children have their activities limited by allergies. 

The Internet allows groups of people to compare experiences and share information to find foods that are safe. Then you have to find a source for those foods — they typically aren’t carried in your local stores, plus they tend to be more expensive — my rice flour cost $4.35 for 24 ounces, while 90 ounces (5 pounds) of regular flour costs about half that.

Often you have to prepare your own food from basic ingredients to avoid additives. This is both expensive and time-consuming.

Some of my corn-sickened friends grow their own chickens and feed them expensive grains so they can eat eggs. Another important aspect of local farming I have been talking about.

How can our Autonomous Vehicles help this vital situation? Inexpensive delivery would be a big help making specialized foods accessible, and saving time and money. Easy delivery, and the smart-apps make it feasible for someone to prepare a specialized food, such as both corn- and soy-free mayonnaise, to choose a real example, and then share it with others, either for free or for a price.

This would facilitate the growth of communities of people who can share information and foods. Often people don’t realize that their problems are food related: many of my friends have related that it has taken them years to diagnose their problems, and most doctors are not helpful, so this sharing is more than just finding foods.

Transportation could also enable these communities to become physical communities, with people moving to live in specific allergen-free physical communities. Easy transportation allows them to get to work, school, and other aspects of daily life.

Imagine choosing your home based on commonality with your neighbors to promote health. Intentional community formation will be a major theme in my consideration of Sustainable Communities.