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?
- It should take you wherever and whenever you want to go
- It should be inexpensive to build and operate
- It should be fast door-to-door, certainly faster than today’s cars, and hopefully much faster
- It should be safe and reliable
- It should be non-polluting, including noise and “visual pollution”
- It should serve all our transportation needs
- It should have a reasonable transition from our current system of roads, cars, and trucks
- It should be expandable to handle future traffic growth and future technologies
- It should enable equality for people who are mobility challenged: including youth, seniors, and the poor – that’s more than 50% of the population!
- 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.
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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