Sustainable Transportation at Burning Man 2015

My friend David and I went to Burning Man 2015 to gift our innovations on Sustainable Transportation. The experience surpassed our expectations: singly and in small groups, over 50 people engaged us in many hours of intriguing discussions, centered on our banners. We came home energized to share and extend our innovations.

Here’s a photo of our location at Burning Man, before all our neighbors moved in. 

   

Do you believe it's possible to increase transportation efficiency by a factor of 10? How about a factor of 100, or 1,000, or even 10,000? How about doing this with safe, personal service?

Our goal is to achieve the efficiency of Freight Trains but while carrying you non-stop wherever you want to go, instead of crunched in a long line of densely packed Cargo Containers, stacked on Freight Train cars, and restricted to traveling along steel rails.

In this post, you’ll see a brief summary of our transportation innovations, the prodigious efficiency of Freight Trains, and the inefficiency of automobiles.

Many of our techniques are fairly well known, separately. However, we assemble them into a comprehensive system that achieves levels of efficiency, personal service, and safety far beyond any other system we have seen.

This banner summarizes our Sustainable Transportation Innovations. In subsequent posts you’ll see these innovations in more detail.

You’ll see why we need to “put the automobile on a diet” to achieve efficient personal service for everyone, not just car owners, and also efficient delivery of items of all sizes, even an individual dose of medicine.

You’ll see how enclosing roadways is a key part of achieving this efficiency: no errant human drivers, pedestrians, animals, debris, or weather to place huge demands on each car. No large batteries: the roadway can supply the power, as subways and electric trains do today, and further increase the efficiency at each stage of providing power.

You’ll see how to automatically pack these individual vehicles and loads into successively larger vehicles, sort of like Russian Dolls, for efficient, fast, and pleasant travel over longer distances. Finally, you’ll see techniques to make this packing dynamic and achieve even higher levels of efficiency and speed.

Later you’ll see opportunities to get started on the path to economically implementing the innovations: airports, senior facilities, hospitals, shopping centers, and new communities. You’ll also see how this level of efficiency and personal service can trigger an avalanche of innovations to improve many aspects of society and get us out of our current “transportation trap”.

Let’s start by seeing what is possible, and beginning to unravel why automobiles fall so far short.

How efficient are Freight Trains? (I got started on this train of thought, sorry, by a snippet I heard on NPR.) On a Freight Train, one tablespoon of oil can carry a one pound load, say a tomato, or perhaps you would prefer a bottle of wine, about 3,656 miles. That’s all the way from the field in California where it was grown to anywhere in the US, even Maine or Florida, and then some. (CSX public data derives this efficiency as “revenue ton miles” divided by “diesel fuel consumed”, including both freight and switching – some people question the claimed efficiency in this reference, but you will see in our analysis how this makes sense, and how our innovations can achieve these levels, and even exceed them.)

How far will your SUV go on 1 tablespoon of oil? Assuming you get 20 mpg driving around town, you could go 413 feet – that won’t even get you out of the parking lot of the market where you bought the tomato, or the bottle of wine.

So the Freight Train is 46,797:1 times more efficient than your SUV.

Right now you’re being skeptical that this could possibly be correct. You’re thinking hey, my Prius gets 54 mpg in the city. Ok, so you can go 1,114 feet on that tablespoon of oil – that gets you out of the parking lot to the stop light down the street, but still a long way from home, and the efficiency ratio is down to only 17,332:1.

Excellent, I’ve got you thinking. J So let’s look in more detail to see if this could possibly be even remotely true.

Suppose the Freight Train had to take you along with the tomato. We’ll pack you in as freight, which would be really uncomfortable, because passenger trains don’t get anything like this kind of efficiency. If you weigh 200 pounds, the Freight Train now has to carry 201 pounds. So you would only go 18 miles (3,656/201) – that’s not even out of the county where the tomato was grown. We’re down to only a factor of 233:1 better than your SUV.

Suppose the Freight Train had to take your 4,000 pound SUV along too. You would only go 4,595 feet. That might not even get you out of the tomato field! Now we’re down to a factor of “only” 11:1 better than your SUV.

Now you’re thinking my Prius only weighs 3,000 pounds, and I only weigh 100 pounds. Ok, so the Freight Train takes you, your Prius, and the tomato 6,225 feet on that tablespoon of oil, and the efficiency ratio is down to only 5:1.

Don’t get too hopeful about that 5:1! Even if you keep tweaking cars to reduce that ratio, remember we have the Freight Train carrying the entire weight of the car. And 5:1 includes all the overhead of the Freight Train: the weight of the engine and cars, all the switching and idling to rearrange loads, etc.

Hopefully, that Freight Train efficiency doesn’t seem so outrageous now. We’ll get into this in more detail, but briefly, this remaining efficiency advantage comes from things like: economy of scale,  “drafting” behind other train cars, steel wheels on steel rails, smooth flat rail bed, no potholes, and fewer stoplights.

Eliminating the overhead weight is thus one key to achieving efficiency. That’s why we’ll look at putting your car on a diet. Then we’ll consider the other efficiency factors between an automobile and a Freight Train that add up to 11:1.

Our next Goal is: The Vehicle Weighs Less Than The Load.