Mass Transit

Our ability to move ourselves and goods quickly and easily about the place is one of the most important aspects of human development. Without good ways to do this the global economy would come to a slow crawl. Mass transit (for which I am including personal motor vehicles and the road network in this essay) is an essential part of modern life. Mass transit operates on many levels for a variety of purposes. There is air travel which offers greatest speed but is expensive. There are cargo ships, liners and tankers which can carry vast quantities of bulky and heavy goods cheaply however they are slow and restricted to seas and oceans. We can use trains which are expensive to set up and consume quite a lot of land area but then offer a good all round package of decent speed, high efficiency and a large capacity. Last but not least is the motor vehicle which is cheap to the point of most people in the developed parts of the world owning one, they are also quick, versatile and very convenient. Most journeys for both goods and people will at some point involve a motor vehicle, even if the larger portion of the distance was spent on a boat or something else.

It is because of the cost and convenience of motor vehicles that they have been so successful. This has meant that there is a lot of infrastructure to support them which in turn has further increased the convenience and practicality of the motor vehicle. Although far more flexible than trains and railways you still need to have roads for your motor vehicles which take up a lot of space as well. Roads have been an integral part of society since its beginning and they have adapted to societies needs. Roads have become more abundant, less sightly and more dangerous, not to mention more crowded as humanity has grown and advanced and exchanged horses for motor vehicles. Hopefully humanity will continue to advance but this will put greater strain on the forms of mass transit that now exist. Typically people focus on the fact that basically all forms of modern transit use fossil fuels which are likely running very low and this can overshadow some other issues which should be addressed as well. While a loss of fossil fuels would make aviation much more expensive* it would still allow for trains, road vehicles and boats to operate electrically, which with the appropriate infrastructure to go with it would not be that much less practical. Bio fuels may also become viable, especially if we manage to manipulate micro organisms into making it for us out of our waste products. There are many scientific options available or just on the horizon that allow us to continue using our various forms of transport beyond the era of fossil fuels. The free market will start to invest in these alternate options more and more as the price of oil goes up. This will gain momentum with each advance in alternate fuels making them more competitive alternatives to oil. Provided we run out slowly rather than overnight I don't think there is too much to worry about in this regard. Things might change a little but the way of life should remain relatively similar. We can safely leave the way we power our transport systems in the hands of the free market, it has done a fantastic job with the far more important task of keeping us fed after all.

* (You would need a fuel with lots of stored energy compared to its weight to power flight, electrical propulsion would weigh far too much with present battery technology. As such we would need to chemically produce a fuel equivalent to high grade engine fuel which is a very costly process, especially if you are not powering that with fossil fuels either. )

What I deem to be a more concerning issue for our transport going forwards are linked more to efficiency, congestion and the negative impacts it has in its current forms on the places in which it passes. This is not something that the free market is so adept and solving. Traffic is one of the biggest inefficiencies in modern life, the economy must lose billions just in the man hours lost with people sat in traffic. There are benefits of living in groups, humans seem to like cities and the more we develop the greater our cities become. Population growth is not always linked with development and discussing the trends of such things is another essay entirely. We can at least say that for now there is still both growth in development and in population, meaning more cars on the roads. There are already many places that have far too many cars for the infrastructure to properly support. Per person the space taken up by a car is far far more than any other kind of vehicle - to support the need for more roads in many cities there would not be any space left for buildings!

Physical space is one big problem for motor vehicles, another is the required coordination to smoothly keep things flowing. Each person controlling their own vehicle makes driving in high volumes of traffic painfully inefficient. For one thing the stop start nature of driving in traffic is incredibly fuel inefficient but it is also needlessly slow. It is impossible for each person to be able to drive so as to optimise the flow of the local road network even if they try and be a considerate and efficient driver. It would however be quite an easy task for a computer to coordinate traffic. Then it could continually integrate and flow without ever needing to stop, cars would join a flow traffic from junctions like meshing cogs. You don’t need to reduce the number of journeys people are taking, nor the number of people to reduce traffic, you can simply reduce the time each journey takes. It would almost certainly be a safer system than trusting the control of cars to the public to have a computer network controlling speeds and direction on the roads.

Even if computers could perfectly coordinate traffic to optimise efficiency there are still concerns over both the volume of the traffic and to the affect it has on the surrounding area. While it may seem a little precious of me and hold less weight than some of the more practical concerns addressed in this essay, I dislike cars on roads. They are fast, heavy and consequently dangerous. They are noisy and dirty and unsightly. They act as vast barricades to the wild, cutting up ecosystems into fragile isolated pockets. Many roads get so fast and wide that they literally must be bridged in order to cross them within our cities. The motor vehicle dominates the road and makes using them for any other mode of transport (bicycle, horse etc) very unappealing. A road can ruin an area simply by proxy and while not the greatest ill in the world, is none the less certainly not a good thing and deserving of thought towards improving them.

Solutions exist with present technology however they would require vast initial investments to set up and would need an infrastructure rivalling road networks to be comparably convenient. It is not certain that humanity will abandon roads or personal vehicles by any means and not just because of the set-up costs of any alternatives. Although the free market will find an alternative to fossil fuels when required it is under no such pressure to solve congestion, pollution and other unwanted inefficiencies from personal vehicles. With the infrastructure already in place it will always be more appealing to work with what we have in economic terms. Solutions to congestion that keep roads will be found first and probably retained for the foreseeable future, perhaps people will spread more evenly. Taking a transport system either above ground level or below it does a great deal to tackle the problems of dissecting ecosystems, of being unsafe and unpleasant, and for coexisting with current roads. Unfortunately it increases the cost substantially and poses far greater engineering challenges.

It would not be practical to either set-up a new mass transit system overnight, nor would it be possible to simply stop using cars and so any new system would need to overlap with the road networks without disrupting them as they were built and then slowly adopted. This means the new system would have to be better in almost every way than cars as it would be competing with them. This is another huge reason why it is unlikely that we shall move away from personal motor vehicles and roads any time soon, if ever.

The image in my mind of such a system to rival cars and roads is like a mono rail with lots of individual carriages, all small but of a few sizes, some decked out to take a loaded pallet while most carry people. They are roomier than cars due to having no controls, no engine, no fuel and the seats facing inward, yet they occupy less space than cars being narrower and shorter. They run on a rail network that laces through the city out of the way of normal goings on. They run on electricity so are clean and quiet as a result. These rails weave through the city, sometimes along the side of wide roads, sometimes suspended above them and occasionally even going underground. There are stops in many more places than you would find for buses or trains, in the busy areas they are like pit lanes that won't hold up any other traffic by stopping in them while on the quieter routes the pods will stop any where to let people on and off. Each stop simply has a button which summons a nearby empty pod, some simply circulate around empty waiting for calls while other sit in holding bays out of the way awaiting peak times. The wait for a pod to arrive is never more than a minute and often much less, they arrive, open their doors and await for passengers to embark. Each has a control panel that is simple to use and allows people to quickly plug in their destination. Most people will have a card, rather like the Oyster card used in the London Underground that can simply be swiped to deal with any charges. They would also have pre loaded frequent destinations to further increase the ease of use. Once the destination is selected the pod moves off, it's route will be planned by a central computer that knows all of the journeys going on within the network. It will be able to adjust speeds and routing to ensure that the journey is as quick as possible while having the least acceleration and deceleration of the pod to reduce energy consumption too. Special pods could be called upon, the goods ones for easy city stock deliveries, larger ones for family trips and space for shopping or perhaps even high speed ones capable of going on motorway tracks that eventually link cities together. It is very optimistic to think that a network capable of operating within a city would also be capable of safe high speed intercity travel and conventional modern trains and mag-lev like they have in Japan and China might still be the best way to go long distances quickly and cheaply on land.

This brief description sounds all rather sci-fi and fanciful but it is well within our technological capabilities to produce one much like it. It would be safer, cleaner, quicker and more efficient than cars and roads, it would allow people to read or work while going places rather than having to drive and it would consume far less space in urban areas. It would combine the personal freedom and convenience of the personal motor car with more automated and efficient train style of transport. Although I have said that it is economic forces that make this idea impractical rather than technological difficulties or because it would be a downgrade on the present system, I have a perfect analogy for how these economic forces hinder it which I must share. Anyone familiar with chemistry will know that reactions that produce energy still need an initial investment energy to get them started which is called the activation energy. Petrol burns with air to produce lots of energy however petrol does not explode or burn with exposure to air, it needs a spark to start it all off. The transit system I have suggested yields more economic energy than the one we currently use as it more efficient, if it were already in place the economy would be better off as a result. The set up costs for the infrastructure however provide a vast activation energy investment that makes us quite stable where we presently are, we would need a lot more than just a spark to get us over the hurdle.

Such a spark is unlikely to come from the private sector, perhaps an ambitious company could pioneer an example system in a single town but getting permission to build all the places it would need to, as well as the time it would take to offer any return on this investment all make it highly unlikely to happen. The only way I can see a serious attempt to improve upon cars within society is for the public sector to initiate the massive undertakings. If cars were still around to compete it would be fine for private companies to own networks for towns as they would be forced to offer competitive prices however if personal cars vanished and no comparable alternative was there private sectors could not be trusted to properly maintain networks, keep prices low and so forth. In the UK we have some excellent case studies of how you can ruin a service by failing to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of private and public sector control. This is particularly the case with geographic monopolies such as a transport network. As a result even our present train network struggles to compete with cars on most fronts. The best solution to this is a joint affair of ownership and control where the state owns all the networks and rents them to companies which are responsible for maintaining and running them. The terms of the leasing would be dictated by the performances of the most efficient companies, with fines imposed for things going wrong which would allow for a form of competition to keep things running optimally and an incentive to maintain the infrastructure. Companies that could offer lower fares would be those that were more likely to get the contracts to run networks and this would keep prices low even without cars to compete.

It is an undertaking of this magnitude which is one of the best ways for a nation to progress out of the economic turmoil presently faced by many developed countries. It would put them in great stead to remain developed for the next chapter of humanity. Sadly this is this kind of radical long term thinking that is somewhat lost in most short term democratic system. The stagnation of transport methods serves as a nice example of the present situation of humanity. We are stuck in a functional but inefficient rut that is not well suited to the obvious challenges facing us in the future.

The wider economic, political and social problems aside, mass transit remains one of the foundations of modern society. My aim with this essay is to highlight issues surrounding our present systems which seem to fall under the radar of public debate. The proposed solutions were more of an attempt to show how good things could be. It is hard to appreciate the failings of our roads when having a car is so much better than not having one for most things. Even if we compare our present system to those in our history we will get a good feeling about what we have. Imagine never sitting in traffic again, never having to take your vehicle to the garage or find somewhere to park again. Imagine never having another crash or getting a fine for speeding. Imagine living near a main transport route and still enjoying a peaceful home life or being able to relax around them with your children and dogs while out and about. As we cannot rely upon the free market to provide us with better transport systems our best hope is that someone in the rare position of being able to implement a better system, even if only in a very localised area, has an urge to make a difference, driven not by profit by by their loathing of sitting in traffic and the other various inefficiencies of roads. Simply by talking about these transport problems we increase the odds that the right person has said urges to improve things.

People moan about traffic on a local scale plenty I'm sure but I fear we are often missing the main reasons why and are therefore taking action that is not the most appropriate. It is the uncooperative nature of driving on roads, the size per person that a car takes up and the stop start nature of town and city driving that causes roads to become grossly inefficient rather that just the sheer volume. We need to see the problem on a bigger scale that also takes the long term future into account. Buses and trains will help to reduce the volume on roads but can't ever replace the door to door on demand convenience of the car and therefore don't solve the problem very well, they simply ward off symptoms. There are few distinct and measurable correlations with the progress of humanity, one would be life expectancy and another would be our ability to move things about the place. We have reached a point where we are getting worse at moving some things about, most notably the hubs of society – the cities. This situation of regression should ring alarm bells that something should be done. It is not so much fuel that threatens our ability to transport things effectively but the actual mechanisms we employ to do it.