Seed Topic: The Future of Transportation

Latest revision as of 14:42, 6 November 2015

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[edit] Seed Topic: The Future of Transportation

[edit] Problems

1. Growing numbers: By 2020 there will be 2 billion gasoline powered, human-driven cars and commercial vehicles on Earth. About 1 in 4 people will own a vehicle. In the US, there are already 8 cars for every 10 people—more than one for every licensed driver.^[1]

2. Traffic-related accidents, almost all caused by human drivers, kill more than 1.2 million people and injure as many as 50 million people per year.^[2]

3. Traffic congestion, primarily caused by human driving habits and poor planning, wastes time, consumes fuel, adds to greenhouse gases and causes stress.^[3]

4. Taking up space: Most vehicles are privately-owned and parked about 95% of the time.^[4] In cities like Los Angeles, vehicle-related uses, including parking, takes up two-thirds of the built environment.^[5]

5. High direct and indirect costs: According to the AAA, the average car, driven 15,000 miles in the U.S., cost $9,100 in 2013 to own and operate. This does not include the cost to the environment, or the legal, medical and emotional costs of the injuries and deaths.^[6]

6. Public Transportation: Cities designed for cars are ugly, encourage sprawl, and reduce the viability of public transportation. As a result, trains, planes and buses, all suffer from scheduling challenges and the “first/last mile” problem, which involves getting to and from transportation hubs.^[7]

7. Many people cannot or should not drive. Car ownership is expensive and time consuming. Many people—especially the very young and the very old— must rely on others for rides.

8. Severe environmental impact: Motor vehicles take a lot of resources to build, store, insure and drive. Internal combustion engines are a major contributor to pollution and global warming. Building one car creates 100,000 pounds of waste and causes as much air pollution as operating it for ten years.^[8]

[edit] Solutions

1. The solution is to encourage the development and implementation of shared, electric-powered, autonomous vehicles. A number of companies already have safe, working prototypes and automated driving features are available now in newer models. Most major car manufacturers expect to have fully autonomous models by 2020. In 2014, a self-driving, 560-horsepower RS7 Audi, with only a computer in the trunk, topped 149 mph on a racetrack to become the fastest driverless car in the world.^[9]

2. Batteries and solar power: Tesla Motors already has a battery with a tested range of 270 miles (EPA) to 310 miles (NEDC). It can be supercharged at one of their hundreds of 480-volt public charging stations to the 200-mile range in 30 minutes, or fully charged in an hour, for free. There are a number of batteries in development which could vastly increase range, including one that uses a novel paper-like material for lithium-ion batteries.^[10] A battery swap option will cost around $50 and take half the time it takes to fill up a gas tank.^[11] Some Tesla free-charging stations are solar powered, and eventually all of them will be. Nonpolluting solar energy is already competitive with other sources in 10 states that are responsible for 90% of U.S. solar production. As a clean technology, compared to dirty, finite fossil fuels, it will only get cheaper and more plentiful. The Internal Energy Agency predicts it will be the biggest source of electricity by mid-century.^[12]

3. Private car ownership should be discouraged, except for owners who let their cars roam for riders. Owners of driverless specialty vehicles could fill this niche.

4. Insurance costs can be virtually eliminated or carried by the manufacturer. Volvo promised a virtually crash-proof model by 2020 and promised to take responsibility if one of their cars ever causes a crash in autonomous mode.^[13][14]

5. Useless activity, risk and stress are eliminated: Travelers can work or play while riding, instead of gripping a steering wheel and staring at the road while driving 13,500 miles per year.^[15]

6. Five-year transition period: At current manufacturing levels (about 90 million motor vehicles per year), we could begin to replace all the world’s gasoline powered vehicles with enough shared, electric vehicles to meet global demand within a five-year period. The roads where unaided humans are allowed to drive should be slowly phased out. Human drivers would be banned from freeways first. Old vehicles should be retrofitted to be autonomous or recycled, with the exception of collectable or specialized vehicles, which can driven on special off-grid tracts.^[16]

7. More for less: Riders will get the kind of vehicle they want, when and where they want it without the hassles of ownership or having to drive.^[17]

8. Democratization: Anyone can ride. Riders can be old, underage, intoxicated, unlicensed, blind or oblivious, and they will be still be chauffeured in luxury at low cost.^[18]

9. The first/last mile problem is eliminated. Driverless vehicles of varying capacity will make public transportation practical even in places where there aren’t buses or trains.^[19]

10. Most parking can be eliminated or converted to other uses. A robot car can just drop you off and another one can pick you up later.^[20]

11. Crime reduction: Car theft or other criminal activity associated with cars would be almost impossible with smart, autonomous vehicles.^[21]

12. Autonomous cars will be safe, smart and interconnected. Using radar, lidar, GPS, and computer vision, they will constantly update their maps to travel in a pack at high speed, negotiate intersections without lights or real world signage, and will use algorithms (eventually quantum computing) to optimize routes.^[22]

13. Motorcycles: Loud motorcycles have long been a public nuisance. Electric motorcycles with gyros and computers could also be made to be silent, fast and nearly crash-proof.^[23]

14. Traffic congestion would be eliminated because the vehicles would negotiate road space automatically, travel at optimum efficiency, and not have accidents. Cars could travel in higher speed platoons, for example, reducing both road space and aerodynamic drag.^[24] Self-driving cars would also be arriving in an era when people do not need to travel as much because of virtual reality.^[25]

15. Protects the environment: Self-driving electric vehicles are clean, quiet and efficient. At least one-quarter of greenhouse gases would be eliminated if all the world’s cars were replaced with shared, autonomous, electric vehicles.^[26] If solar energy replaced greenhouse gas, another 32% would be eliminated.^[27]

[edit] New challenges

1. Millions of jobs will permanently disappear, including taxi drivers, chauffeurs, most auto mechanics and parking lot attendants. Fewer vehicles will be manufactured. A technology dividend will probably have to be instituted at some point to compensate people for the massive job elimination created by AI, robots and other technological innovations.^[28]

2. Loss of privacy in smart vehicles: Shared cars will be constantly monitored, like in many public spaces today. But new rules will have to be instituted (e.g. surveillance inside cars can only be reviewed under certain circumstances).^[29]

3. Obstinate human drivers and the love of danger: Some will say, “you’ll have to pry my steering wheel from my dead fingers before I’ll stop driving my own car.” There will have to be off-grid tracts, where people can drive steerable vehicles for recreational or sport purposes. The auto racing industry would go out of business without car crashes, but even driverless cars could be told to race aggressively and cause crashes.^[30]

4. Newly-built infrastructure should be pedestrian friendly: New towns and neighborhoods should be designed on the New Pedestrian model, with separate grids for vehicles and people walking or cycling. Self-driving cars won’t need traffic lights, stop lights or signage, as all pertinent information will be transmitted wirelessly between cars, passengers and traffic control. It’s better if cyclists and pedestrians aren’t introduced into vehicular lanes.^[31]

[edit] References

1. ↑ Sperling, D., and D. Gordon. Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability. Oxford University Press, 2009.
2. ↑ "World report on road traffic injury prevention". World Health Organization. Geneva, 2004, p. 3
3. ↑ O’Toole, Randal, “Solving the problem of traffic congestion,” National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) October 8, 2012
4. ↑ Barter, Paul, “‘Cars are parked 95% of the time.’ Let’s check!” reinventingparking.org, Feb. 22, 2013
5. ↑ J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, (W.W. Norton and Company, 2000), pg. 55
6. ↑ Chumley, Cheryl K., “AAA: Annual car ownership costs rose to $9,100,” The Washington Times, April 17, 2013.
7. ↑ “The first, last, and toughest mile in transportation,” Utne Reader, September–October, 2009, http://www.utne.com/environment/first-last-toughest-mile-in-transportation.aspx
8. ↑ J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, (W.W. Norton and Company, 2000), pg. 55,66.
9. ↑ Ziegler, Chris, “Watch a self-driving Audi become 'the fastest autonomous car on the planet,” The Verge, October 20, 2014.
10. ↑ Zachary Favors, Hamed Hosseini Bay, Zafer Mutlu, Kazi Ahmed, Robert Ionescu, Rachel Ye, Mihrimah Ozkan & Cengiz S. Ozkan. Towards Scalable Binderless Electrodes: Carbon Coated Silicon Nanofiber Paper via Mg Reduction of Electrospun SiO2 Nanofibers. Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 8246, 06 February 2015; DOI:10.1038/srep08246
11. ↑ http://www.teslamotors.com, accessed February 18, 2015.
12. ↑ Randall, Tom, “While you were getting worked up over oil prices, this just happened to solar,” Boomberg Business, October 29, 2014.
13. ↑ Steven, Tim, “Inside Volvo's self-driving car: Improving driver safety without the driver,” CNET, May 16, 2014
14. ↑ Su, Jean-Baptise, “Exclusive Interview: Ford CEO Expects Fully Autonomous Cars in 5 years.” Forbes, 2-05-2015.
15. ↑ Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 2010, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/rc1c.cfm
16. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth: Breaking the Stranglehold of the Special Interests, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 36 - “Self-Driving Cars” pp. 363-368.
17. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 36 - “Self-Driving Cars” pp. 363-368.
18. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 36 - “Self-Driving Cars” pp. 363-368.
19. ↑ “The first, last, and toughest mile in transportation,” Utne Reader, September–October, 2009, http://www.utne.com/environment/first-last-toughest-mile-in-transportation.aspx
20. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 36 - “Self-Driving Cars” pp. 363-368.
21. ↑ Miller, Owen. "Robotic Cars and Their New Crime Paradigms". September 3, 2014, Retrieved 20 February 2015. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140903073835-260074537-robotic-cars-and-their-new-crime-paradigms
22. ↑ Lassa, Todd, “The Beginning of the End of Driving: The Autonomous Car Continues to Progress,” Motor Trend, January 2013. [1]
23. ↑ Fitchard, Kevin, “Honda, BMW experiment with the autonomous motorcycle,” Gigaom, June 10, 2013, https://gigaom.com/2013/06/10/the-car-is-getting-connected-but-what-about-the-motorcycle/ Accessed February 20, 2015
24. ↑ Troppe, Will, “Energy implications of autonomous vehicles: imagining the possibilities,” Rocky Mountain Institute, September 9, 2014.
25. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 37 - “Virtual Reality” pp. 368-373.
26. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 34 - “Global Warming” pp. 342-352.
27. ↑ “Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emission” EPA, epa.gov.
28. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 36 - “Self-Driving Cars” pp. 363-368.
29. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 36 - “Self-Driving Cars” pp. 363-368.
30. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 36 - “Self-Driving Cars” pp. 363-368.
31. ↑ Arth, Michael, Democracy and the Common Wealth, Golden Apples Media, 2010, Chapter 38 - “New Pedestrianism,” pp. 373-384