Premises:
These requirements are already reflected by market forces (high oil prices, declining dollar, declining real wages, declining asset values). However, many observers believe that these market forces are emerging too slowly and irrationally to guide the real economy. Entrenched interests in energy, finance, and industry, speculators in the energy markets, and conflicting signals in subsidies and regulations are only a few of many causes of the ineffectiveness and irrationality of the energy and transportation markets.
The regional population is rational-- it adapts to higher prices and congestion in the long run. Most of our requirements for moving people, packages and freight are not elastic in the short term. Requirements are not negotiable, other than by quitting jobs, canceling purchases or sales, selling homes, etc. The public has had little choice but adapt to the limited choices allowed by our built-up infrastructures, installed by past governments. Our primary solution is the 3000 to 6000 pound, single occupant vehicle.
Governments are absolutely responsible for the crisis in transportation. Humanity has built one billion gas-powered cars, and a road system. People are making more investments in cars every day. This is disastrous.
Citizens are being offered proposals only for roads, tunnels, bridges, and mass transit compatible with the existing automobiles and trucks -- yet, those vehicles were designed principally in response to the designs of existing roads-- a circular, self-reinforcing process.
The choices currently offered by government policy are sub-optimal. More fuel is being wasted, more driving time wasted, and CO2 generated than would result from a comprehensive, objective, rational design.
Back to basics: rights of way
People have a right to move around the surface of the planet. Today's rails, streets and highways occupy our rights of way. An Interstate highway is a tenant, occupying a right of way corridor. So are the railways. Both systems - streets and rails - limit the types of vehicles that can exist on them, and they do a lousy job. These systems actually block our rights of way to use much better vehicles, that better serve the requirements of a majority of people and trips.
Transportation systems also influence our choices of destinations by imposing unequal costs, and as a result, influence land use patterns and the direction of regional growth. There is no intrinsic reason a transportation system should control where you can go, and not go. Stewardship or occupancy of areas of land should be decided independently, based on merits of different options, and ideally, transportation would serve those decisions. Not vice versa.
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Our regional area is basically a plane -- a plane is a two-dimensional shape. |
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Transportation requirements exist between ALL points on the plane. A road, bus route, or light rail is basically a line -- a one-dimensional shape. A line can only connect two points (or a series of points). It would require a very large number of lines to fully serve a plane as large as the Puget Sound region... so we built a network of streets. | |
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Your goal is to minimize cost in time, fuel, and CO2 for movements between the points of origin and destination. Cost is a function of the routes available, and the friction, detours, and interruptions they impose. Vehicle design follows from road conditions. Road conditions are the #1 determinant of vehicle design. |
We have arrived in 2009 with traffic lanes 10 to 12 feet wide, overhead clearances of 15 to 20 feet and more. These policy decisions have produced a giantism in vehicles, which is the principle reason for both congestion and excessive fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. The irony is, most traffic is single-occupancy, because that is the requirement--moving one person to work. The policy decisions of the past compel bad citizenship and waste -- it would be suicidal to drive small, truly efficient vehicles alongside existing trucks and cars, at this stage of history with human drivers, without automation of vehicles, and without barriers to protect our lanes.
Begin with comprehensive model of transport requirements...
The Puget Sound Regional Council is the agency charged with transportation planning in western washington. Today's models such as http://www.psrc.org/data/tdmodel/models.htm are incomplete. They are based on rules of thumb. They are influenced by somebody's assumptions of where the important destinations "are", and how many people must be moved between particular suburbs, and the destinations, i.e., somebody's commercial districts or factories. Instead of designing transportation neutrally, transportation is affected by land use planning goals. The actual requirements of a transportation system are fuel efficiency, minimizing cost and trip times, safety, minimizing pollution, etc. These are fundamentally independent of particular places. The influence of banks, developers and downtown property owners become, essentially, thumbs on the scale determining the designs of mass transit, streets, and highways. Automobile, construction, and transit people also have their thumbs on the scale, in their determination to sell their own products. Growth planning advocates also, literally, wish to constrain mobility. Literally, they are opposed to general efficiency in transportation, they seek to maximize efficiency within desired zones, and inhibit efficiency outside the growth boundaries.
To repeat: the design decisions of our transportation system emerge out of profit seeking behavior and other goals by participants in PSRC, the State Legislature, and counties and cities. Profit is particularly incompatible with optimizing transportation outcomes, because a) it does not minimize costs, even in the best of situations: companies gladly impose 1000 units of physical waste and consumption as long as they can recover it, plus $1 of profit. Ask any businessman: would you prefer a contract with $1 million in costs having $1 thousand profit, or a contract causing $100 million in costs having $2 thousand profit? b) furthermore, the costs of the transportation industry are mostly externalized costs. The transportation industry does not pay them.
Every citizen of this region has a vital stake in decisions of the PSRC.
Here is one of their modeling documents:
DESTINATION 2030 2007 Action Strategy for Destination 2030. The
region's biennial plan review document on progress implementing Destination
2030, the long-range transportation plan, and looking ahead at the region's
priorities for the next ten years. May 2007. 117p.
www.psrc.org/projects/mtp/2007actionstrategy.pdf
The work of the PSRC is not based on a comprehensive model of peoples' requirements. It is based on regional business planning. The business community, and some growth management people. Anybody who has participated in PUD hearings or any land use matters at city or county level, knows that the winners in these hearings are the people with the endless time, patience and tireless energy that money provides, to keep showing up at every hearing with great speaking skills, great brochures and exhibits, great attire denoting money and power. City officials who don't accommodate developers' plans are targeted, in elections.
We need fundamentally different designs in our rights-of-way. City and state governments have a critical role in protecting the rights-of-way of all citizens-- not just those with giant vehicles.
... and your solution would be much smaller lanes:
Cities and counties could begin allocating lanes for smaller vehicles, approximately 5 feet wide and 5 feet high. Some of these rights-of-way could be carved out of existing streets. There are also many possibilities for entirely new routes that would add new capacity.
When these lanes operate alongside existing trucks and SUVs, they will require some type of
guide rail or thin jersey-barrier. The width
of these rights-of-way, and design of the guiderail or barrier, would be decided after defining the
goals, such as sizes of loads.
A new generation of vehicles would emerge very quickly..
The basic principle is: drive without guiderails on local streets, with rubber wheels, but access the
5x5 guideways on arterials and freeways.
The smallest vehicles might be electric or hybrids, about the size of a mattress. Or they could be almost as large as some of the compact car today. Drivers would have to buy the cars. There may be perhaps, a rail for electric power --for example, the government might give discounted electricity as an incentive to utilize the new guideways. but do not be distracted by the technology choices--focus on the underlying principle that faster trips, greater capacity are achieved by smaller vehicles, because you will have many more lanes, cheaper tunnels and overpasses, bypassing traffic signals, parking closer to destinations, etc.
Let us imagine, the height and width of the vehicle itself were limited to
whatever will fit in a 5x5 foot guideway including corners. You would also
have to limit the length, because otherwise, long vehicles would get jammed in
the corners. You would also have to limit the weight, otherwise,
nobody could design the bridges. So, imagine you are in a 4-seat
car, nearly 5 feet wide, and 12 feet long.
When you're riding in this thing, you're reclining back. Since the guideway is
very precisely built, the floor of the car is only 4 inches above the guideway.
and very comfortable. You have room for 95% of the
typical driver- two kids plus groceries, for example. The
ride is reasonably fast, and pleasant but your biggest time savings is
there are many fewer red lights. The interior of your car is very clean,
quiet, and pleasant.
The low height and weight makes it very cheap and practical to build
overpasses/underpasses at EVERY intersection. Steel fabricators
crank out mass-produced bridge and guideway sections. Guideway
sections are completely low-tech, global, commodity product in 20- and 40-foot
containerized sizes, easily transported and assembled.
Parking lots become very very efficient and automated, because all of the cars have programmable steering/brakes, and there is standard limit to sizes. (No hummers, trucks etc.) Vehicles are so light that many buildings begin automatic parking systems in basements, roofs and alleys, and vertical shafts. Commercial ventures compete to provide off-ramps for the guideway, which are essentially, miniature "train stations" with retail.
Homeowners can buy steel auto-parking kits below $5,000 that store multiple
5x5 cars, above or below grade. Community autoparks are built. You can
call
your car on the cellphone, and it comes to your home. All kinds of partnerships and ventures
emerge, for car sharing, car rental, taxi service, etc. enabled by the
auto-pickup feature. The biggest political issue is getting guideways improvements deeper into neighborhoods but they are so cheap, most of them are
built by local revenue bonds. Elevated, soundproof guideway sections are available on the market with privacy fences allowing passengers to
see the horizon but not downward into the living rooms of homes. Community
groups build elevated guideways across their neighborhoods to reduce cut-thru
traffic.
The guideway has switches just like a miniature railway. You
inform the system your destination before entering the guideway, and it
switches you to your destination. Once you are on the guideway, all
routing, starting and stopping is automatic. Most drivers read, telephone
or use computers, while riding inside the guideways. Basically, there are no stops at the switches, because
traffic is merged and split automatically. You're only traveling 30
to 40 mph, but that's virtually door to door, nonstop. You're not even
spending time on parking.
Redundant systems on the cars detect system failures on the guideway. You have airbags. When a vehicle loses power, the computers engage the vehicle behind to push it to the next offramp. This is part of the contract. And rarely happens. And the bastard must pay you $250, automatically deducted from his membership bond.
There is a police, fire and rescue track on top of some of the guideway sections.
The guideways don't get you all the way home. They have on-ramps
and off-ramps like miniature freeways... you would drive from your
home to the arterial street like a conventional car. But once you
enter the guideway, your car is controlled by the systems' computers.
Almost all of the capacity of the guideways downtown is additional, new, elevated capacity unlike buses and trains which reduce street capacity.
All of this financed mostly by private enterprise. Many lives will be saved. Fuel will be saved. It will be much quieter. It will be much faster (no traffic signals). Only the trucks and SUVs will have to deal with red lights.
IN CONCLUSION: This is just another proposal, on top of 100 other proposals. Let's have an objective, scientific set of criteria--- a real requirements model-- and judge the winner based on the requirements model. Boeing and Microsoft could build this in 6 months, if not for the vested interests in the downtowns, the banks, and so forth.
Todd
Ultralight vehicles-
abolish red lights: http://www.rosehill.net/ultralight.htm
Tokyo Mass Transit - read this http://www.rosehill.net/tokyomemes.htm
Radio
Transit dream: http://www.rosehill.net/radiotransitdream.htm
Cars: http://www.rosehill.net/cars.htm
more guideways >http://www.shouldexist.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2000/6/18/16345/2672;tool=post&mode=moderate