Engineering theFuture

In this essay, I am going to attempt to put some numbers on some of the more relevant logistics and costs associated with transforming our transportation system to one that is automated and powered with wind and solar energy. This is a difficult topic to put into narrative but important to get a grasp of in order to have any gauge of the possibility of undertaking such a massive project. If anyone thinks they have better numbers for anything mentioned herein, I would be happy to hear about them since good information about much of this is difficult to find.

As I have mentioned previously, prefabrication will be one of the innovations that make this system better than our current roads. The question then becomes; how big can the pieces be? Current standards for one direction of travel on interstate highways call for two 12 foot lanes, 10 feet of paved right shoulder and 4 feet of paved left shoulder for a total of 38 feet. I am going to use 39 feet total for purposes of easier calculation. Other assumptions i will make are; 100 foot length, 3 ft. depth, and concrete materials. Concrete and reinforcing weighs a little over 2 tons per square yard but since there will be grooves for utilities in the sections we will call it two tons. All told this comes out to around 2,600 tons per section, well within the capacity of todays biggest cranes, some of which are capable of lifting over 14,000 tons. The larger problem will be transporting the sections. The largest weight I can find a source for having been transported on the highway is about half the 2600 tons cited above. Structural considerations will also come into play, so it may be that 50′ sections are more practical anyway. At any rate, the larger the sections of road, the less leveling and aligning that will be needed. This is important because every piece that needs aligned and leveled adds time to construction.

Materials for the above mentioned sections will be said to be 100′ in length for easy math. Numbers can be halved if 50′ lengths are required. If we say concrete is $100/cu. yd. (most contractors pay less but we are talking about the government here, besides it makes the math easy) and you have about 1300 cubic yards per section, each will cost $13,000. I figure it will be a wash between the lesser actual amount of concrete and cost for reinforcement materials (5% is usual extra cost). The current interstate system is a little under 50,000 miles so I will use that number to come up with $3.43 billion for materials for the bottom half of the system. The top half of the system that will enclose the roadway will not need to be as robust as the travel half and therefore should not be as expensive. However, any project of this scale will likely drive up prices at least to the point that we can more than double the $3.43 billion to about $7 billion. According to the Congressional Budget Office labor costs for road building varies from about $70,000 to a bit over $100,000 per mile. I think we can do much better with laying prefabricated sections but will take near the high end at $100,000 per mile to be conservative and to make easier math and come up with about $5 billion in labor costs. If we throw in another billion dollars for special equipment for handling sections of road, the total for the systems initial phase infrastructure comes to about $13 billion. Even if that figure goes up several times, it shows that the cost is well within the ability of our government to support and compares very favorably with the inadequate $50 billion a year of federal highway spending slated for the next couple of years.

Perhaps the largest expense will be vehicles to operate on the new system. To arrive at a reasonable figure I will assume that vehicles for the automated system will cost no more than cars do today and use $20,000 per vehicle as a ballpark estimate. Certain technology to be available in the new vehicles will likely offset much of the savings from economy of scale but it should be possible to keep costs nearer the low end of what new cars now cost. Depending on the specifics of the vehicles and system, it may be necessary to build as many as 250 million of them when the system is completed but for the part I am estimating at present will only consider 150 million, which I still consider to be a very conservative estimate.  Now we are talking some real money at $3 trillion but let’s put it into perspective. Right now households in America already spend a trillion dollars every year on a very dangerous form of land transportation that not everyone is even able to use. The new system would travel up to four times the speed of current interstate roadways, so if the USDoT figure of 500 million hours per week in vehicles is close to correct, half a trillion dollars or more could be saved every year by cutting that time in half.

The current fastest computers in the world do as many calculations per second as if every human in the world sat at their computers 24/7 entering data for 46 years.  The Cray Jaguar or IBM Roadrunner are a relative bargain at $100 million and either should be able to handle the information load necessary for a good control system. Even if 2 or 3 of them is required to have the redundancy required for such a system, the total costs for the controls should not exceed several billion dollars with hardware included. Just to put a number in it I will say $20 billion including labor, again being fairly conservative.  This still leaves total cost for the system at just a little over $3 trillion or about two years of what our present system costs, which I believe is still a pretty good bargain.

In order to run the system off wind and solar energy, it will be necessary to incorporate some kind of grid into the network and it would be a good thing to make it robust enough to become the  nationwide grid we need so badly to maximize efficiency of these power sources. In America, we use about 100 quadrillion BTU’s of energy per year, about a quarter of which is used for transportation. This translates to about 75 billion kilowatt hours or 800 megawatts of generating capacity. I am going to disregard solar for the purposes of this exercise and assume that windmills only generate 1/4 of their capacity so that 3,200 MW of generating capacity is required, an unreasonably high number but one that should give an idea of what the costs are. There are wind generators that can produce 6 MW of electricity but we will only consider 500 KW size since I have seen them listed for $50,000 (heck, they had 12 KW generators back in the 1880′s) and it makes for easy math once again. It would take 6400 such generators to supply the power stated above or cost about $320 million. Even if the cables and other equipment cost many times what the generators do, we are still talking a couple of billion dollars, not a large part of the system’s total cost. Just building the grid to what we need is estimated to cost many times this amount if done alone.

Adding networks like wi-fi, potable water, gas or anything else will increase cost but I would argue not by as much as any would cost to do alone. Many of the estimates above are ridiculously conservative but I believe the approximation of three trillion dollars is a fair figure for comparison purposes. One valid comparison I believe is that the federal government has spent half of that total for economic stimulus in just the past two years with very little concrete results to show for it. This is mainly meant to show that this project is well within our means to accomplish once we decide that operating dangerous 19th century design machines on roads that are technologically 2,000+ years old is not good enough for the 21st century.

This will be the first essay I have written in this blog that is not devoted to any of the usual technical topics written about here. It is long overdue that I thank some of the people who have made this blog possible, however. The first people I wish to mention and thank are my friends Mike, Bryan S., Ben, Preston, and the “Grange” crew who have helped me along several times. Also, I would like to thank Kathy with the two rat terriers from Lake Anna who restored my faith in the random kindness of strangers when it was being severely tested. A huge thanks goes out to my friends Lisa and Nan, who picked me up from the gutter, brushed me off, and got me going again. Without these two wonderful women, there is no chance I would be writing today in this forum. My dad and brother also deserve thanks for enabling me to live for a while without having to worry about bills while I did research and writing. My final thanks goes out to anyone who has written in support of what I have been writing about in this blog. It is heartening to see that so many bother to take the time to give a few words of encouragement. I am sure there are many others who deserve a thank you as well but these are the main folks who have helped me out in the past year and that deserve special mention of appreciation.

Anyone who studies land transportation in America knows that the federal government does not actually own many roads and that most of them are on federal property, like parks. This means that states and localities would have to cede control (and upkeep) to the federal government for a national transit system to be implemented. At first, this will be a major barrier for basically the same reasons that building any system will find resistance. There is one place where the federal government has control and ownership, however, Washington D.C.

The District would be a good place to begin building an automated system for several reasons besides being already owned by the feds. The first reason is, because there are enough places to build parking for people to be able to drive to the city and leave their cars on the outskirts while using the system going to and from downtown. If parking rates were charged similar to what fees would be in the city, the system might even be free to use for those commuters. Another good thing about starting in D.C. is that the area is small enough that the high speed part of the system would be unnecessary to perfect right from the start. Fifty miles an hour is still a fast rate of speed to travel there or in the downtown of any large metropolis.  Even with the speeds slower than what should be expected for a high speed system, it would still only take 10-15 minutes to get anywhere within the city. It takes longer now even without much traffic to get in the way.

It is an inside joke that people from Washington are well used to traffic delays for various reasons. There is some truth to the joke, however, because a few main thoroughfares handle most of the traffic and shutting even one of them off can cause major headaches. Much of the work on a new system can use secondary roads for the initial phase of installation and it can be timed such that shutting down of the main roadways, when necessary, is done at night or on weekends. Additionally, much of the work could be done during times when Congress is out of session and not as much commuting into the city is done. Once begun, work should take no longer than a few months until the system is up and running and less than a year to be substantially completed within the city.

Once a good system is finished within the District and the inevitable bugs have been worked out, there is perfect opportunity to begin expansion. There is already a corridor approved to Dulles Airport that has yet to be built on and interstates or major roadways going in all directions suitable for building on. Again, speed of construction will be a major consideration since many of the roads are major interstate travel routes in addition to being important for commuters. The corridor from D.C. to Baltimore, for example should have the goal of being completed to the point of being usable within two months. Of course, that stretch of the system will require more lanes added as it gets more use the farther the new automated system extends. The more experience is gained, the faster construction should proceed.

Once the first stage in our nation’s capital is finished, I would think that most state governments would be happy to cede control of highways to the federal government in exchange for not having to build and maintain the newer system. Highway maintenance and construction is one of the largest expenses in every state budget and not many of them would even have interstate highways without federal subsidies for them. Once the federal funding stops, the states will not want to pay for all of the roads themselves. Besides, after it is shown that the automated system is a superior means of getting around, it seems like the citizenry will demand it of their states, especially once they realize keeping the roads they already have will require higher state and local taxes.

Any city or metropolitan area could be used for a starting point but Washingtone D.C.  may be the easiest to actually do it because of the land issues. It is also situated in the middle of one of the major north-south travel corridors in the country, without travel actually going through the city. These are the roads that need to be converted in the beginning as well and it ought to be done quickly for minimal disruption. Once construction begins to extend the system outside the city, D.C. is in a good position to quickly complete the next sections because of its proximity to Baltimore and Richmond. It may turn out that somewhere is better, like on the west coast, but that is just my thoughts about it at this time.

This past year the Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal deficit to be $1.4 trillion. This is a vast sum of money for not much visible gain. As far as this observer can tell there was very little progress in the areas of upgrading our infrastructure, job formation, energy security and sustainability, reducing the causes of greenhouse gas emissions, and the federal budget and trade deficits. Beginning to build a modern transportation system that is automated and powered with wind and solar energy would go a long way toward helping to solve all of these problems.  Do not think that I am saying this is a panacea or even the only solution but it is the best start we can make, in my opinion. Otherwise, I would be writing about doing something else. If that $1.4 trillion was spent on upgrading our transit system every year in the manner I have described, we will have substantially completed the entire system in about 30 years.

The 21st century, so far, has seen zero or slightly negative net job creation, no decade since the Great Depression has seen less than 20% growth. Median household inflation adjusted income for middle and low income households has fallen for the first time ever since the 1960′s, when that statistic started being kept. Household inflation adjusted net income has fallen as well for the first time since that statistic began being kept in the 1950′s. Household debt increased over 100% during the same period and we began having a negative savings rate for the first time since the Great Depression. In addition to people going into debt to buy ever more expensive houses, corporate America borrowed record amounts for mostly buying each other out rather than job creation and research and development. All of this in spite of record low interest rates from the Federal Reserve for most of the decade. Even the record government spending on economic stimulus and financial system bailouts has done little to alter any of this.

Since I have already talked about infrastructure previously I will not do so here except to point out that nearly all of our transportation and utility infrastructure is in dire need of upgrading and maintenance. Most of the jobs that have been lost are now overseas in labor markets where workers are paid a tiny fraction of what the American workers who lost their jobs are paid. Plus, in many cases it is illegal for those low-paid workers to form unions or sue their employers over unsafe or unfair working conditions. When an automated transit system is built, it will not only employ millions of people in well paying jobs but those jobs cannot be sent overseas either. My preliminary estimates for employment show that over 10 million jobs could be created (even more depending on how quickly building is done) during construction with as many as 4.5 million being permanent positions.  Despite these jobs being created by government, it would not be necessary to use taxes to keep supporting them since the system will generate its own income, eventually enough to pay for itself.

In America we use about 1/4 of all our energy production for transportation, the vast majority on automobiles and trucks, nearly all of which is petroleum. This translates to over 50% of our petroleum use in this country and coincidentally, is about the same amount of oil that we import. In addition, oil imports cost us about $400 billion last year or a little more than the trade deficit for the same period. One does not have to be very smart to see how converting that petroleum use to wind and solar energy will help our balance of trade and increase energy security. Today our entire economy is vulnerable to wild fluctuations in oil prices and subject to having supply cut off on the whim of OPEC or a major corporate oil producer. Besides all of that, worldwide petroleum use is on the rise and known reserves are dwindling, an unsustainable paradigm. Because of this, running our transportation system on wind and solar power will make even more sense as time goes on.

While it is true that building such a huge project will substantially increase the federal deficit for some time, eventually the system will be self supporting and it will become no longer necessary to spend the vast sums government at all levels is now spending on transportation. Financing such a project is no trivial matter but if our financial sector can issue somewhere between $500 trillion and a quadrillion dollars worth of derivatives in a little over a decade, it seems like we can find the money to do this. The beauty of it is that there will be concrete results to show for our troubles, unlike much current federal spending.

The final thing I want to talk about in this essay is greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Scientists are telling us that we have to cut back our emission of greenhouse gases in a big way or we run the risk of causing major environmental damage. Changing our main modes of transportation from fossil fuels to renewable sources could reduce carbon emissions by as much as 30% or more. No other scheme I have seen proposed will cut emissions anywhere near this amount. In addition, we will also reduce or eliminate emission pollutants like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, nitrogen dioxide, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH’s) and ozone among others caused by motor vehicles. All of these are known to have deleterious effects on human and environmental health.

Anybody with half a brain can see at first glance that modernizing our infrastructure as proposed in this blog will cost more money than anything ever undertaken by American government.  In this essay I will attempt to quantify and justify those expenses and give an idea of the scale of sacrifice required to complete it.

I would, first of all, like to briefly touch on the reasons for radically changing our current infrastructure. In addition to being old, both technologically and repair-wise, there are a good number of social reasons for updating our transportation and utility grids. In my mind one of the biggest is that our highways kill 40,000 and injure millions of Americans and cost billions of dollars every single year. Automation will eliminate most, if not all, of these. Another very large thing is energy security. Right now we are spending ridiculous amounts of money to secure an energy source (oil) that environmental scientists tell us we need to be abandoning as fast as possible. Does anybody doubt that the oil embargo of the 1970′s put a large crimp in our economy? It can and will happen again if we don’t take conscious effort to prevent it. Powering all of the vehicles with wind and solar energy, ensures a source that is steady and cannot be cut off on the whim of a sultan. It would convert 1/4 of our total energy consumption (and over half of the oil use) to renewable sources without doing anything else. Also our electric grid is in bad need of upgrading. Not only do we have frequent blackouts from weather related problems, but we are taxing the system to the point where another regional power loss like the one in the northeast in 2003 seems inevitable. Incorporating the power grid into the new transit system will allow upgrading the system and get the lines in a place where weather and individuals with a destructive bent cannot easily reach them to cause havoc.  I am not going to try detailing every reason for change here but when you take this on top of the amount of time wasted from an inefficient transit system and the waste of trying to support both public and private transit, plus consider the efficiencies of consolidation it is apparent there are good reasons to make this change. The only real question is how much sacrifice is justified by it?

Now comes the fun part, trying to put numbers on all of this. My cost estimates for building the new system are very preliminary so I will use the upper end of $50 trillion (or about 3 times current national GDP) for comparison purposes, most of the other numbers are fairly widely available. During World War II we spent about 1/3 of our GDP on the war effort, doing so now shows that we could pay for the system in 10 years. While expecting to do this is a ridiculous proposition, I am merely pointing out that it is possible to do in a relatively short time with enough national motivation. The costs should be spread out over a longer period, probably 20-30 years or more, and once the first part of the system is in operation, will be bringing in money to help. This purchase price of three times income is almost exactly what was recommended for home buyers until lending rules were liberalized the past couple of decades, showing that it is doable with long term repayment plans. Compare this, as well, to the $40-$60 trillion we are likely to be collectively spending on transportation over the same period of time and you see that the economics of purchase are not very much different. While it is true that users will be subsidizing the system to a greater extent from paying to use it in addition to what the government pays, it is obvious that as the price of gasoline and other costs rise, the balance will be tipped well into favor of building a new system just from an economics point of view.

Another big number I would like to discuss is employment. When you combine all of the mass transit systems with all of the roads and railroads, then tack on several utilities, it is obvious that the system will employ millions of people in what should be moderately well-paying jobs. Without going into specific numbers it can be noted that this is far more than are claimed to be employed by any other economic stimulus plan that I have seen. Even after construction is substantially completed, the system will require millions of employees to provide services and maintenance. These will be long term jobs and not ones that will disappear in a few years. There will be a trickle down effect as well when other businesses based on the transit system begin starting up. As I finish my economic analysis I will have more concrete numbers for employment effects, but wanted to point out the scale of the situation.

In America today there are approximately 200,000,000 licensed drivers, meaning about another 100,000,000 people are not able to ever use the highway system on their own. If we throw out the 20,000,000 or so who are too young to be able to use the system, anyway, it still leaves around 80,000,000 who, for whatever reason are unable to operate a motor vehicle to get where they need to go. When the people who are licensed to drive but probably shouldn’t be are added in, that number grows even greater. Nearly all of these people would be able to access a well designed personal transit system if they are capable of acting on their own.

As if the reasons given so far weren’t enough there is one other thing that I want to point out, security. The first part of this is economic security. In addition to the security of not being held hostage by foreign suppliers as referred to earlier, there is the security of stable prices for transportation and to a lesser degree electricity. How much easier is it for planning when you know that prices will remain within a very narrow range? How much less profiteering off of consumers would happen without large fluctuations in price to allow it? I don’t think it is a all unfair to assert that these would both be positive reasons to change our way of doing things. When you also consider that the system would be stable employment for such a large number of people, it seems that would also help with stability. The second part of security is the physical one. Besides cutting down your risk of bodily injury or death, from travel, by orders of magnitude, It would make it much harder to pull off a terrorist act like the Oklahoma City bombing since a shipment of anything that large would have to be authorized by the receiving entity. Additionally, it would be more difficult to load that large amount of materials into a vehicle out of sight of the system.

When a better economic analysis is completed the above discussion will be more easily quantified but the purpose at this juncture is to give anyone considering the ideas presented by me a basis to begin from. I have only become more confident, as the cost/benefit analysis has progressed, that the numbers will show that the system proposed will be far more than a marginal benefit in both short and long term.

This particular essay will be controversial on many levels. Its purpose will be to lay the groundwork for my reasoning about how such a large scale and far reaching project should be operated and controlled rather than address every criticism. In building a nationwide automated transit system we would be combining all of the road, rail, and mass transit entities in the country into one. In addition, we will be creating a new electric and utility grids, power generation facilities, and repair and maintenance facilities. By the time all is said and done, whatever entity ends up controlling the system will be responsible for trillions of dollars in assets, have a (nearly) complete monopoly on ground transport in America, be the largest generator of electricity in the world, be the largest employer in the U.S. if not the world, and have nearly as much revenue generation as the federal government.

Mark Delucchi at University of California-Davis estimates the total land value of  American highways to be around $3.3 trillion in2007 dollars. We can quibble about the exact number but I am using it for some perspective for comparisons because when you throw in the value of rail and other mass transit assets (no to even mention the utilities included), the number grows even larger. The current largest corporation in the world is Exxon Mobil at around a half trillion dollars in value, giving us an idea of just how much bigger a nationwide transit will be in terms of revenues and assets controlled. In addition, the transit company will be a monopoly controlling virtually all land based travel and transport and a substantial part of the utilities in America. It is my opinion that these conditions do not allow us to subject this vital asset of American life to the vagaries of the  market. To begin with, there is no “”market” when you have a monopoly. Secondly, the government is already heavily involved in controlling and subsidizing land transport in this country so completely taking it over is not as much of a change as some would like us to believe. And finally, if there is money to be made from transit, why not return that to the people who use it (virtually everyone) in the form of reduced taxes and better service. The key to this will be to have accountability for everyone from the janitor on up to the CEO, which will be discussed later.

Aside from being a monopoly for land transportation, the system would generate approximately a quarter of all of the energy used in this country, the vast majority of which will be consumed internally. If it is deemed desirable, enough solar panels and windmills could be installed on the road system to generate over half of the energy America uses. In comparison the largest electric utilities in the country right now control less than 15% of the generating capacity. It doesn’t take a Nobel prize winning mathematician to see that the largest electric utility in the country, by far, will be added to the worlds largest corporation.  With that much economic activity controlled by one entity it is obvious that it will also be one of the largest employers in the world. Add the $1.5-$2 trillion America spends annually on its transportation to all of the rest and you can also see that revenues can easily rival or exceed those of the federal government.

There are good reasons for creating such a behemoth organization that I believe outweigh any reasons for not building the modern system of transportation infrastructure we are capable of. The first thing that comes to my mind is that doing so will take much of the decision making about transportation needs for our nation out of the political arena or at least insulate them somewhat. It would also standardize that decision making and quality of construction and upkeep. Another benefit of doing this is there should be many savings from economy of scale. How much more efficient is it to produce mainly one or two types of vehicle and limited numbers of others for specialized uses than to produce hundreds of different models, many of which are never sold until they are leftover for the next model year, cutting into the following years need for production? How much more efficient would it be to have mechanics doing mostly scheduled maintenance  and less time on emergency repairs, requiring less overtime? How much more efficient would it be for the government to have the system pay for itself or even only almost do so? How much more efficient is it for those same governments to not have to build, maintain, operate, and police the entire system like they do at present? Finally, aside from the converting petroleum use to renewables, preventing 40,000 deaths every year, etc. that might be done in some other manner, I can see no other way of ever successfully taking on a project of this magnitude without some way of having centralized control in some form.

The case for public ownership rather than private ownership I think can be best made by history. I will point out a few examples to show why I favor public ownership. Despite the belief in certain people that government can’t do anything right, it has shown in very many cases it does do things right, sometimes spectacularly. One only need think about things like; the U.S. Postal Service (which still provides good service despite all of its problems), Depression era CCC, a strong military, NASA, and social security and medicare that have provided a safety net for millions. In fact, it seems like many of the most outstanding achievements of our nation, have been accomplished by government. Compare this with the way private entities have acted when given so much control, from robber barons to Enron to current military contractors, I can think of no examples where a privately held monopoly (or near monopoly) has ever benefited the majority of citizens in America unless there was strong government regulation anyway. These are the biggest reasons I feel it is necessary to keep any entity with such broad impact on our economy in the public rather than private domain. The rest of this essay will be about how to get the most productive and accountable public corporation possible.

While there may be entities out there that operate in the manner I am about to describe, it is certain that none are anywhere near the scale of the corporation that would be created by this project. With so much economic activity associated with a national transit system, it is imperative that the controlling entity be accountable to those who finance and use the system, namely the American public. One of the problems with accountability in current models is that, in most of them, there is little relationship between the success of the company and how the employees of said company are paid. For the most part, the only correlation is that those on the lowest rung will lose their livelihoods when the company begins to fail. Failure is not an option if we want to have the modern infrastructure I am proposing. It is not an easy thing to tie peoples pay to the overall success of the enterprise they are a part of but there are many ways of doing it. The first way is to have a basic salary for everyone employed with monthly, quarterly, or annual bonuses for performance of the system. While difficult, it should not be impossible to be able to set targets to be met and base bonuses on them. These targets would include but are not limited to; adhering to construction deadlines, staying within budget, success in adopting more efficient methods of doing things, achieving revenue expectations, and keeping high safety standards. Innovators whose ideas get implemented should also be paid for them in some sort of proportion to the worth of their benefit. There is no reason that this model cannot become the standard by which corporations of all kinds are measured against.

The intent today is to lay out the biggest socio-political problems presented by such a large scale project as automating our transportation system and powering it with wind and solar energy and talk about possible solutions. The first thing that needs to be overcome is inertia i.e. people get into habit of doing things the same way as before, especially if it has worked out well in the past. This problem, I believe to be mostly a matter of perception. Fact is that, while it has served its purpose for providing a fast and convenient way of moving passengers and freight, it also has had many side effects that have not served us well. In my mind, foremost among them is the 40,000 people that die each year in accidents involving vehicles. If we compare that to the 4,000 people dying from terrorism over many years and how much we are spending to keep that from happening again to the far greater number that die on our highways every year and the amount we spend on fixing that, there really isn’t any comparison. For the same money per life saved, we could build several automated systems of the kind I am suggesting in this blog and modernize our system in addition to making it safer. There are many other reasons covered in Why Bother Changing the Transit System as to why I think this perception is not correct but suffice it to say that I think it is one that can and should be changed. Another part of this inertia is that there is a whole economy and infrastructure that is built around automobiles which will be changed or supplanted by a nationwide automated system. I am still in the process of sorting economic numbers for a good comparison but the old story about keeping buggy whip makers in business even after nobody uses buggies anymore comes to mind. You don’t want to keep producing obsolete products when something better comes along, in other words. To begin with many of those people would be employed by the transit system or a related industry. Also, as powerful an economic engine as the auto industry in America has been, recent events have cast doubt on much of the industry’s future viability. In any event, the auto industry would not be put out of business overnight, if ever (we still have buggy whip makers for the few who still want or need one) and vehicles for the new system will have to be made by someone. Associated industries like auto repair, gas stations, and quickie marts will also be affected but is that enough to say that we shouldn’t build a modern transportation system? In the last century, what would have happened if farmers decided that the tractor would take away too many of their livelihoods? Not to trivialize the economic upheaval but it seems like we have been through it before and survived so there is little reason to think that we won’t do so  again.

The inertia I have talked about so far means that there will be a host of people with vested interest in the current way of doing things lined up to oppose any sort of change that might interfere with their area of interest, with little or no regard to whether or not it will improve the majority of our lives. These interests are going to be the largest impediment to building any sort of modern, automated system but I believe once the case is fully made for change most of them will have to go along with it. I will not state the case here except to point out that many of the most difficult problems we face would be addressed in part or in full by a massive project like this. Elaboration will have to wait for future essays. Politicians sooner or later are going to have to take a stand on this idea if popularized but they are not even being asked about it in today’s political dialogue. One of the great things about living in a democracy (even if it is only a representational one), is that if there is a large enough majority, anything can be changed. It is all about changing perception.

Once people decide automation is a good thing and worth pursuing, there is still the question of how to pay for it all. Personally, I see no realistic method of building such gargantuan project any other way than by the federal government. No corporation in the world has the assets, manpower, and wherewithal enough to attempt such a thing. Additionally, I don’t see us allowing the federal government to hand over trillions of dollars in assets to privately owned corporations in such an overt manner. This will prompt opposition from those who oppose the government being involved in any meaningful economic activity outside of flushing trillions of dollars down the military-industrial drain. In reality, our government is already in the business of running our transportation system. Not only does government build and maintain virtually every road and mass transit system in America but we have been subsidizing manufacture and ownership of cars for the past year or so and not for the first time either. There are also a host of laws about building, owning, and operating automobiles that are implemented and enforced by government. In fact, the transportation industry is probably the most heavily regulated and subsidized industry in America today so it is not such a leap of faith to think that a government owned entity could be successful. It seems likely that said entity will require structure different from what is typical among businesses today including making wages relate to performance and that there is accountability but these, too, will be expanded on at a later time.

It is fair to ask how the government can afford to undertake this project when the national debt is already so high. Part of the answer is that the government has already committed itself to spending nearly as much money anyway on our present course to maintain and marginally improve the system we have. Also, at present we are supporting both private  and public transit to the detriment of both. How long can we continue subsidizing both? A well run automated system would be able to pay for itself through receipts, economic activity generated, and lives saved among many things and over the long term be a bargain in comparison to what we are doing now. The final thing I will say about the economics today is that it is going to be the most expensive outlay ever but is well worth the investment.

Another of the social problems associated with building a good nationwide transit system is that construction will inevitably inconvenience a large number of people. This makes it imperative that construction proceed quickly, faster than any that occurs today. There is little that can be done other than keeping the length of disruption to a minimum through prefabrication and other methods and keeping the public informed of schedules and progress. If construction times are kept to days and weeks instead of the current months and years, people should be able to plan vacations or ways to avoid travel during those times and much more easily avoid the congestion temporarily caused. Ultimately, there will be much less disruption of lives for a much better result than we get from the process used now.

There are other concerns besides the ones I have mentioned, like environmental, integration, logistical, safety, and reliability problems. For the most part these are technical issues that can be solved through careful planning and implementation. Automated transit should be superior to our present system in every one of these but to keep this writing at a reasonable length will have to await further discussion. I believe that these problems will be relatively easy to solve in comparison to the ones mentioned earlier in this essay. This last set of problems will be much more straightforward to solve than the challenge of getting enough people to realize that a fully automated transit system powered with renewable energy sources is the best alternative.

I am often asked why should we combine utilities with a new transit system when that will just increase the cost of the whole project. The simple answer is that many of our utility grids are in need of repair or expansion and ultimately, by tackling everything at once, the combined cost will be less than if we do it piecemeal. In examining this further, I will spend the bulk of this post talking about the electrical grid for most of it. Many of the points about the electric distribution system are equally valid for other utilities.

Our electric grid is still basically the same as when Nikolai Tesla began sending AC current through the grid in Great Barrington, Mass. in 1886. This was an improvement over the DC power generated by Thomas Edison because it enabled long distance transmission of power with more efficiency, among other things. Since that time, we have learned a great deal but changed little. Sure, we have gone to a three phase system, use transformers, automated many things, and made the system more robust, but the system is still basically the same, mostly overhead wires on poles. While it easy to build and maintain this type of grid, it also makes it vulnerable to weather, accidents, and terrorism and other malintent which cause fairly frequent interruption of service in many places. If the grid was incorporated into the structure of the roadways of a new transit system, not only would most of the problem of possible blackouts be solved but we could have a truly national grid. It makes sense to do this in several ways. If the system is to be powered by wind and solar energy, it is possible to do it without having expensive backup if the grid is the size of the continental U.S. Another good thing for consumers would be that all sources could be connected to the grid, thereby allowing the cheapest sources to provide the most energy anywhere in America. Blackouts should become rare events and be repaired faster, saving our economy billions of dollars. Carnegie Mellon estimated in 2004 that blackouts cost the economy $112/day per person, showing that major loss of electricity to any large metropolitan area costs a bundle in a very short time. By incorporating the power grid with the transportation system it will be easier to protect it against all malicious intent, including terrorism. The final thing I will mention is that it will not be far into the future  before we will be able to build a superconducting grid. Such a grid could be retrofitted into the transit grid far more easily than trying to run it where current power lines go since it is unlikely to be strung between poles like wires.

Knowledgeable entities like the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission say the current grid is completely inadequate for growing energy needs, particularly in the “northeast corridor” from Washington D. C. to New York City. The expected “fix”, building a 2100 mile nationwide grid costing at least $75 billion,  kind of reminds me of Steve Martin’s new house in “The Jerk” where it is exactly like the old house only bigger. Any major improvement will likely cost many times that amount but would be less if incorporated into major reconstruction of the highways. In addition, it would be easier to make the grid “smart”by using the same computer and backups used for the transportation system to monitor the electric grid and automatically switch between power sources as necessary. This would also make the transit system able to take energy from outside sources should it ever be needed.

Other utilities I would like to see incorporated into the system include fiber optics and telecommunications, video surveillance, gas piping, potable water, and perhaps someday a hydrogen transmission line. Fiber optics have been being used since the mid-70′s and would benefit by upgrading with the better quality optical wire and lasers that have been developed more recently. A nationwide wi-fi network would also be of great benefit. In addition to being able to use a laptop or other wi-fi connected device while riding on the system, it would provide access to the majority of people in America. Along with the wi-fi network, it would be very easy to add in antennae for telecommunications (cell phone towers). Video surveillance sounds insidious to many people but such a network would provide some protection of individuals from crime while on the system and make it harder for a would be terrorist to get away with some dastardly deed. It should also make it possible to stream video to the inside of vehicles on the system to give the appearance of looking out the window while in transit. Incorporating natural gas lines into the system around major urban areas would allow many more people to consider that option for use and replace many aging systems. The reason I include potable water in this list is that more and more municipalities are unable to produce enough acceptable drinking water for use by their citizens. This system would be use for drinking water only and charge a premium rate for its use, perhaps ten cents a gallon. This would ensure the potable water supply for almost everywhere.

Excess power generation from the transit grid could be put to work manufacturing hydrogen, compressing air, charging batteries, or some other method of energy storage. Having piping for hydrogen already installed would be great for any distribution scheme. There may be other utilities that would be beneficial to incorporate but these are the main ones that I have been able to consider.

A common question people have about any new kind of transit system is; Won’t there be people or freight that cannot be transported on the system? The answer is that no system can ever accommodate every imaginable circumstance. Even today, things like the space shuttle cannot be accommodated by the road/rail system but there are ways to be able to use any new system for all of the things we currently use roads or rails for.  The three main areas requiring special planning that I intend to discuss here are; freight, tradesman use and social services (police, fire and rescue, etc.). Each of these present problems for any sort of automated system where it is an advantage to have the vehicle design as uniform as possible.

In order to have such a wide variety of traffic, there must be several different designs of vehicle able to traverse the system. The most widely used vehicles will be for 2, 4, or 8 passengers and all of these will be fairly similar in appearance and function. If an individual wanted to own one or more of these vehicles for their exclusive use, there is nothing that would preclude it. The next most commonly required vehicle will be for freight. These could come in many different models for moving everything from chickens to mobile homes. Oversize loads can be accommodated by larger vehicles that will take up more than one lane of traffic and will likely be restricted to slower lanes and off-peak hours travel. Other loads can be loaded into freight containers and carried in much the same manner as trucks on today’s highways. Special vehicles for refrigerated, hazardous, live and other loads would be constructed to necessary specifications as required and would also be required to travel in the slower lanes. Any freight that is to be unenclosed will require inspection to ensure safety. Many, if not most, smaller loads could be sent in one of the vehicles used mainly for passengers. Again, any of these vehicles could be privately owned and even leased to third parties when not being used by the owner.

There are any number of professions that require vehicles that are specialized in on way or another for carrying the equipment needed for the job. These could either be purchased and customized by individuals or have universal utility vehicles  usable by anyone.  These will differ from passenger vehicles mainly in having more space available for cargo as opposed to passengers and be somewhat larger, enough to carry things like ladders and 2 x 4 boards. Once again, these vehicles will not travel the fastest lanes. Use of  both these and freight vehicles will likely not be implemented until the system begins operation in more than just a few high traffic corridors.

At last, we come to service vehicles, things like fire engines, ambulances, and police cars. Most of the time, these vehicles would be able to do whatever is necessary within the boundaries of a well-planned system. Of course, there will be cases where it will be absolutely impossible to accomplish the task at hand without going somewhere off the grid. Until the system becomes ubiquitous enough to make powered land travel off-grid onerous, it will be unnecessary to greatly change the way things are done now. At that time, however, it may become imperative to have some number of vehicles that can travel both on and off of the network. Such vehicles would operate as freight does on grid and like regular vehicles do today when off grid. If the system is well designed, response times should improve significantly. Since an automated system will eliminate the need for cops needed for traffic enforcement, many of the current police cars will become unnecessary. This will also free up law enforcement to investigate more serious crimes. If most travel is done on the automated system, as I expect, there will be little need for cars to track down criminals in most cases and the vast majority of police could walk or bicycle their “beat” since criminals would not be driving away in a getaway car.

In conclusion I would like to say that, while freight and services present their own unique problems for any system, automated or not, none are insurmountable enough to be a valid reason for not to pursuing automation. Furthermore, a well engineered system would be a vast improvement over the chaos that reigns over todays highways for safety, speed, and efficiency.

I am well aware of how difficult it is going to be changing the minds of enough people to begin on as grand scale an endeavor as automating our highways and improving the American infrastructure that is in disrepair. Because of the radical thinking required to envision it, this is probably the biggest obstacle to ever actually having a truly modern highway system in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. In my opinion, truly bringing America’s infrastructure into the 21st century would be as great an achievement as any the human race has seen. However, nobody should ever jump into a project of this scale without having some vision of what the results are going to be and how they are to be achieved. Showing people what is possible is the only way to overcome the social and political inertia against change, therefore they will not be addressed in particular now but wait until a later post.
All of the technological problems presented by automating a nationwide transportation grid have been overcome. While nobody has ever attempted such an ambitious project, all of the technologies needed are currently in widespread use in one form or another. My intent in this essay is not to go into the specifics of batteries vs. electrified rail, RFID vs. magnetic strips, etc. but to outline how to begin such a monumental undertaking and what the system should generally look like. People will have to be convinced that the results will be substantially better than what they already have in order for them to want it.
One of the biggest valid complaints I have heard about automation is that it is unable to handle the traffic on a busy thoroughfare. For any system that is dependent upon a rail or other guideway, where there can only be a single lane of traffic, it is probably impossible to solve this. That is why I propose to have at least three lanes of traffic in each direction through most of the system and in high volume corridors perhaps as many as ten or more. This will allow for merging and slowing or accelerating without slowing down the entire system.The first lane of a typical section of the system would only be used for merging on and off of the system except under the highest traffic volumes. The middle lane would be for local trips (no need to go 200 mph if you are only going a mile or two) and acceleration and deceleration from the faster lanes. From the third lane outward, travel should be able to exceed 200 mph without even slowing down for major metropolitan areas during their busiest times of use if the system is properly designed. Ability to easily switch lanes will enable more traffic flow and provided there are enough lanes will make the system capable of handling demand beyond what even the best mass transit systems are able to achieve today. This leads to the question of how all of those people will get on and off of the system at the same time? This will be explained shortly when I talk about prefabrication.
Another valid concern is, where do we get the land to build? Actually, we already have the vast majority of it before ever starting in the form of present highways, railroads, and rail and utility rights of way. The problem with using these is that something is going to be disrupted while construction is being done on the new road. I believe this makes it imperative that new construction progress as quickly as possible once begun. The way road construction is done today, it can take many months of construction to redo a pretty short section of the road. In addition, our highways wear out much more quickly by having vehicles traveling over fresh pavement rather than allowing it to cure first. Both of these can be overcome by prefabricating the roadway in sections, including pieces for tunnels, bridges, supports, stations, etc. Anyone who has ever seen Legos or Hot Wheels track should be able to envision how this might be done. This should enable miles of track to be lain every day instead of many days to do a short stretch. A section from Baltimore to Washington D.C. (about 40 miles), for example, should be able to be completed in two weeks to a month. Compare this to construction on the 1900 mile long I-95 corridor on the east coast of the U.S. where we began before there was even a widespread notion of an interstate system and still haven’t completed it over half a century later. Another benefit to prefabrication would be allowing pieces of the system to be stacked into tiers. In addition to allowing more lanes of traffic for a given area, you will also be able to build your entry/exit stations with as many levels as is required for peak traffic. The final benefit of prefabrication I wish to talk about is that it will make the system much easier to maintain and repair. If a section is starting to get out of alignment, the central computer for the system will know it from feedback by all of the vehicles that traverse there sending back a signal that they hit a bump at some particular spot. Once it gets close to exceeding allowable parameters, a maintenance crew is sent to level, repair or replace that section of the highway.
Even if construction goes perfectly according to plan, it is probably best not to begin with an already overused corridor of traffic such as between Baltimore and D.C. as mentioned above since there will not yet be any connections to the system. A better choice would be using the proposed high-speed rail right of way from Dulles Airport to the District or as a connection between two smaller cities closer together like Akron and Youngstown, Ohio. Another way of starting to build would be to take some metropolitan area like Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota and put parking lots around the perimeter of the city where you could board the automated system into the downtown areas, which would be entirely served by automation. More than one of these methods could be used at the same time but until long stretches of the system are completed, ridership is not likely to be much better than what is served by todays public transit systems. It must be kept in mind, however that construction inconvenience should be kept to a minimum or it will become a reason for some to oppose building it altogether.
Once the first parts of the system are completed it will only get more useful to more people over time, eventually replacing cars, railroads and mass transit of all kinds as the system grows. With good planning and enough will, we could have an automated system connecting nearly all major metropolitan areas in America within 20-25 years and substantially everywhere roads go in less than 40 years. The 40,000 deaths, millions of injuries, and well over $200 billion of damage caused by our current system every year make a compelling argument for this kind of change. Now we have the ability to begin changing whenever we decide to get around to doing it.