Chapter 29 
Transportation

Transportation is the movement of people and goods from one place to another. It is the quintessential infrastructure. Transportation is vital to trade and to civilization. 
Problems
Problems in transportation are endemic to most big cities, one of the principal disadvantages of an urban lifestyle. Traffic jams slow urban car, truck and bus travel to slower than a bicycle. The US kills 30K people per year in car accidents and hundreds of thousands are injured. If you include the health effects of air pollution and psychological stressors like Òroad rageÓ, pretty much everyone is adversely affected. [Inrix 2016] reports some statistics from their study of 2013Õs traffic jams on France, Germany, UK and US:
¥ $200B wasted in traffic overall
¥ Average cost to a driver: $1740
¥ Average time wasted in congestion: 111 hours.
Oil
Oil is used mostly for transportation because it packs a lot of power per weight and volume (significantly more than state-of -the-art batteries). But its political consequences are high. [Klare 2005] articulates that most places oil is produced (Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, USA, Canada) it causes big problems (pollution, war, propping up dictators). Since KlareÕs book, America has reduced its dependency on foreign oil, but at the high externality costs of fracking. The XL-pipeline is looming as yet another attack on the ecosphere.
Land
Land use by cars is so extensive that it causes there to be greater distances between the places where you want to go. From [Litman 2014] we learn: Òin automobile-dependent communities with road and parking supply sufficient to keep traffic congestion to the level typical in U.S. cities, plus parking spaces at most destinations, a city must devote between 2,000 and 4,000 square feet (200-400 square meters) of land to roads and off-street parking per automobile. This exceeds the amount of land devoted to housing per capita for moderate to high development densitiesÓ. Yikes!
Land has three variables guiding its price: location, location, and location. But what do we really get by being in a location? Most of it is Òproximity to somewhere we go frequentlyÓ. We care about proximity primarily because closer places take less time to travel to. But with faster transport, the disadvantage of being further away isnÕt as great. We could, for instance, live further from the city on cheaper land, and still have a short (time-wise) commute with a good transit system. 
Cost
From [DOT 2015] the US Department of Transportation budget for 2015 is $90B. The preamble to this document quotes Obama: ÒWeÕll need Congress to protect more than three million jobs by finishing transportation and waterways bills this summer.Ó Then in the very next sentence: ÒBut I will act on my own to slash bureaucracyÓ. Hint to the president: Òbureaucracy is jobsÓ. You canÕt simultaneously protect and cut jobs. 
From our experience with federal and state departments of transportation, they have little to do with transportation. They are about jobs. Whether those jobs produce better transportation infrastructure is irrelevant to senior policy makers. What is relevant are votes for re-election or just maintaining the jobs within the department. Efficient allocation of resources is good. 
Transportation projects are the classic pork-barrel projects and pork is not efficient. (Note to presidents, governors, secretaries: please prove us wrong. Read this chapter, call us, and weÕll help you construct an efficient allocation of transportation dollars. Then weÕll revise this chapter. Note to readers: If youÕre reading an up-to-date version of this chapter, the politicians are still not interested in improving transportation.) 
Direct costs to a car owner are about $9K per year including depreciation, fuel, maintenance, insurance and taxes [Peterson 2014]. But that leaves out tolls, parking, having the land for a driveway, snow removal, health costs (including accidents and asthma), and the Middle East wars caused, in no small part, by demand for oil. For a typical car owner, their car is more expensive than health care, food, education and other categories. We also spend an awful lot of time commuting.
Solutions
Reduce transportation
Like solutions to the high costs of other infrastructure systems, our first strategy is to reduce the need for transportation by fulfilling its functionality in cheaper ways with fewer detrimental externalities.
Reducing people transportation
3D/holographic teleconferencing is coming. It can have visuals nearly as good as reality, and audio better than reality. So going into the office, or ßying for meeting people will become unnecessarily wasteful. 
By having home body sensors, much of the movement of people for health reasons can also be eliminated. Smart phones with attachments already allow people to take many measurements of themselves. More are coming. The phone can transmit these measurements to a doctor or a program in the cloud and appropriate instructions can be transmitted back. This is, after all, information transportation. Some other material goods needed for cures (braces, crutches, prosthetics) can now be printed at home. In the future, medications will also be able to be printed, saving trips to the pharmacy. 
We can save many trips that people now do in order to get something by just moving the objects and a smaller vehicle. See Efficient Goods Transportation below.
Reducing transportation of goods
If you make (including grow) most of the material things that you consume, transporting them from the store to your house goes away, as does the goodÕs transportation to the store. You will still need some raw materials, but with parametric designs, you can take greater advantage of local materials and reduce their transportation costs too. When youÕre making your own stuff, you can make just what you need, when you need it, so the inefficiencies of overproduction and spoilage also go way down. Packaging for shipment is eliminated, thus getting rid of yet more paper production (and foam peanuts). All that packaging is normally thrown out, but without it, our waste stream is way down. By composting bio-waste, and recycling the objects you print back into your printer to make other objects, there is very little waste left, eliminating trash trucks, their labor, oil use and pollution along with landfills and waste incineration. 
Oil and gas are now transported in trucks and pipes. By getting more efficient buildings and vehicles, we reduce the need to transport oil and gas. By converting to electric appliances, generating the electricity with solar panels and storing it in batteries (all 3D printed and used locally of course) we eliminate the transportation of energy. That in turn eliminates the pipes, utility poles, and their wires, reducing their manufacture, transportation, installation, maintenance and the traffic jams that maintenance causes.
By having more efficient appliances, we can drastically reduce our water usage along with the need for sewer. For what little water is still needed, we can collect water on roofs or from the air and store it locally. Composting toilets and graywater gardens can handle the water we donÕt recycle. Thus we eliminate water pipes, sewer pipes and their manufacture, transportation and installation. With electricity, gas, water and sewer pipes no long under our streets, the ever-present road construction caused by the need to repair underlying infrastructure is dramatically reduced, thus increasing roads traffic-carrying capacity. 
Reducing goods transportation means less of a need for traveling salesmen (including business deal makers and ambassadors).
Reducing military transportation
Of course the military can take advantage of many of the above reductions. But thereÕs a special reduction to be made for military. By reducing oil use, and solving scarcity, we reduce war and the need to move an awful lot of people and supplies thousands of miles. However, the military can do a great job in disaster relief because they are experts in logistics. If current trends prevail, there will be plenty of climate-induced disasters. Mitigating our polluting transportation infrastructure will help, but this is a long-term play.
Efficient transportation
We canÕt eliminate all transportation and still lead a comfortable lifestyle. So for the transportation we still need, high-tech to the rescue!
Personal rapid transit
Cars in the US contain, on average 1.2 people. Moving a 3K pound vehicle with a payload of one 150 pound person (5% of vehicle weight) is wasteful. For urban and dense suburbs, Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) makes sense. It uses guideways over city streets. The best systems have a guideway with a cross section of a little more than a square foot, with 2 passenger pods hanging below. The guideways can form loops or even grids, with stations every ? mile to every mile. Pods are waiting at stations for people so that when people arrive they get into a pod and go with no waiting. The pods are automatically routed to the destination station, bypassing the Òoff lineÓ intervening stations for non-stop traffic. Speed in a city can be 30 to 45 miles an hour, beating single digit bus and car MPH by several times. Since the guideway is much cheaper than subway or light rail lines, and stations are much smaller and cheaper, placing them at frequent intervals in a city means every spot can be within a several minute walk. This is the only transit architecture we know of that is cheap and fast enough to be viable in suburbs (2K residents per square mile and above). 
Energy usage is much lower than a car. At several hundred pounds, thereÕs a lot less mass to accelerate. Because the pods travel non-stop, they donÕt need to re-accelerate at each red light or stop sign. Under computer control, there are no traffic jams or accidents to slow down travel and waste energy. Due to lower frontal area (the two passengers can be in tandem), and a more aerodynamic shape, aerodynamic drag is lower than is practical for cars. Hard wheels on steel rails or even MagLev decreases rolling resistance, further increasing energy efficiency. Electric motors improve efficiency further, is quiet, low maintenance and can be solar powered from panels on the guideway or near by. Hundreds of MPGe are possible with the right engineering, several times more efficient than electric cars. 
PRTs can also handle most of the goods transport in cities (see below). The back seat can contain a foldable bike or electric scooter. We can use modified pods for ambulances and trash hauling. Workmen can store tools in lockers at PRT stations so they donÕt have to lug them the last ? mile home. PRT stations can have mail boxes. Since residents within a PRT network will likely be using it each day, picking up mail and packages at the nearest PRT station on the way home (you get a text if thereÕs any mail) doesnÕt cost much time and saves the expense, pollution, noise and danger of delivery trucks.
A well implemented PRT system is cheaper per passenger mile than cars, buses (including bus rapid transit), light rail, and subway. We estimate that a system in a modest sized-city of 150K population or more can be self-supporting on passenger fares that are significantly less than all the above modes with no taxes for capital or operational costs and far fewer externalities. Fry drew up a national plan using PRT that won the Judges choice award in a sustainability contest at MITÕs business school in 2012 [Fry 2011]. Two particularly efficient systems are [SkyTran 2016] and TransitX [Stanley 2017].
Last mile
PRT stations in a well-covered city will likely be average 1/4 of a mile from your door (3 to 4 minute walk), though some locations could be a mile or more from where you really want to go. A well-designed PRT pod will have enough room for a person and their bike, particularly if its a foldable bike. Scooters, including powered ones, can be even smaller than a bike. Our July 2015 favorite for this Òlast mileÓ is [OneWheel 2016]. It is essentially a powered skateboard with one big, central wheel 11.5 inches in diameter, 6 inches fat with a 2 horsepower electric motor in the hub. Top speed is 15MPH, range is 6 miles, charge time is 20 minutes, cost is $1.5K. Because of the big wheel and computer-controlled balancing, you can ride it off-road, so the sidewalk/pavement infrastructure is unnecessary. At 25 pounds it is carriable, but perhaps future versions will allow you to remove half the battery for short-distance commuters. This product is yet another successful Kickstarter project. The last item on their spec sheet: ÒAwesome: extremelyÕ. 
People power
With cars off the streets, itÕs safer (you wonÕt get run over), healthier (improved air quality), quieter, faster to walk and bike. Bike share enables people to rent bikes for a short period in a city (typically 30 minutes). It is convenient. Since the system maintains the bikes, you donÕt have to have a place to store it, and you can ride a bike just one way on a trip. Bike share systems canÕt support themselves off of rider fares. However, by encouraging fewer cars and a healthier lifestyle, in the larger picture, theyÕre a win. [Bike-Sharing 2017] says there were 2.3M public bicycles worldwide in about 1200 cities, at the end of 2016. VŽlib, ParisÕ mature bike sharing system, says that each bicycle is used an average of 6 times a day. 
Car sharing
Cars are bad in the city, but to go beyond the economical reaches of a PRT system, there isnÕt another good alternative. We like the Zipcar model at the edge stations of a PRT system to let people get into the sticks without the expense and space-hogging of owning a car. Since shared cars get used many more times a day than private cars, they save on parking spots, one of the most expensive aspects of cars.
Autonomous automobiles
The Google self-driving car gets a ton of press. It is similar to PRT in that both have electric motors and no driver. PRT is better because itÕs less accident-prone than a car can ever be due the highly controlled guideway. Because it is not prone to crashes, it needs less weight in crash protection, making it more efficient. It also neednÕt stop at intersections and does not have traffic slow-downs. This also improves efficiency since a PRT just needs to accelerate once per trip, then goes a constant speed to its destination. Good PRTÕs also have less rolling resistance due to maglev or hard wheels on steel rails. You could build a 2 seater tandem car, but big car manufacturers donÕt. Good PRTs do, so they have far less aerodynamic drag, making PRT even more efficient. 
Autonomous cars need lots of sensors and computrons for scene recognition. PRTs donÕt so they are cheaper. The lighter pod makes them cheaper too. A PRT guideway is about the same cost as a lane of freeway but can handle more passengers per mile, and takes up a fraction of a laneÕs worth of land. The guideway needs less maintenance than a road. PRTs and their guideways are both more reliable and cheaper.
PRT systems need a certain concentration of riders, so they are not cost-effective in rural areas. HereÕs where cars, including autonomous ones have an advantage. Half of the US population lives in areas dense enough for PRT to make economic sense. The advantage of PRT over cars (of any sort) is much greater than the advantage of autonomous cars over regular cars. Thus PRT is a much better investment of near term R&D dollars, but autonomous cars have received much more investment. 
Hyperloop
The 1981 book named 2018 by Gerard OÕNiel described vacuum tube ÒtrackÓ for an extremely low aerodynamic train which could travel at thousands of miles an hour using little energy. 
In 2013 Elon Musk proposed Hyperloop [Musk 2013]. Hyperloop tubes are not quite a hard vacuum, making them somewhat less dangerous for humans. By directing the small amount of air underneath the vehicle, the Hyperloop vehicle can ÒskiÓ on the airßow, with very little Òrolling resistanceÓ, and as such doesnÕt need maglev technology. The rough specs for an LA to SF route are: 350 miles, 600MPH, 35 minutes, $6B track cost for $17M per mile. One critic projected a cost of $100B.
ThereÕs a lot of clever ideas in Hyperloop. But most traffic is not inter-city, itÕs within a metro area. Hyperloop is solving a significant, but relatively minor problem. Because of its speed, stations need to be far apart to accommodate their long on and off ramps. Stations are also expensive since they have to carefully handle air pressure. 
People donÕt care about traveling merely station to station, but rather, door to door. 28 passengers per vehicle means that you couldnÕt hope to put stations near where people were going and maintain Ònon-stopÓ travel. This is the same problem that airplane travel has today. Only once we have decent bike and PRT networks, would a system like Hyperloop be worth looking into.
Efficient cars
Modern cars are quite inefficient. We can do much better. In 2002, Volkswagen made a prototype named the 1-Litre. It was a tandem 2 seater, very low aerodynamic drag, weighed just 639 pounds, and had a one cylinder diesel engine that had a measly 8.6 horse power. It got 238MPG. 13 years later, why arenÕt these cars common? [Arcimoto 2017] is a 3 wheeled, 2 seater, all electric car, with a range of about 100 miles, getting north of 200MPGe. Production is estimated in 2017 for less than $20K per car.
A more radical design is the Lit Motors Motorcycle. It has only two wheels, but it is fully enclosed with an aerodynamic shell and a steering wheel. It has two powerful gyroscopes that keep it up right, even when stopped. The all electric engine and light weight make for a quick bike that promises 400MPGe or so. The range is 200 miles per charge. The Lit motorcycle is so efficient that a foldable solar panel stretched over the top of it while it sits in a parking lot all day will provide enough energy for many commutes. Lit was started in 2010 but as of the end of 2016, production is still a ways off. 3D printing has been used for prototyping cars and other vehicles. As materials get stronger and printers can produce bigger parts, printers are now being used for making much of actual cars. 
Airplanes
Big airplanes are noisy and polluting. Their airports take up a lot of room. TheyÕre a terrorist magnet, or at least an opportunity for the Security Industrial Complex to rake in more of your money. A 150 MPH, a PRT pod can go the 2.5K miles from NYC to LA in 16.6 hours. 
Though thatÕs a lot slower than an airplaneÕs theoretical 500MPH, consider that taking a fast PRT, you wouldnÕt have to determine in advance to take a trip, spend an hour buying the ticket, travel to an airport, get there an hour early, take off late because they canceled your ßight since every seat wasnÕt filled, wait for 200 people to get on and off the plane, walk long distances in the airport and get from the airport to your actual destination.
Terrafugia
There have been a few personal airplanes developed as of late. Take the Òßying carÓ approach of [Terrafugia 2017] which can travel of road as well as ßy. Their ÒTransitionÓ model get 20 MPG in the air. Terrible gas mileage, but considering it ßies at 100 MPH and doesnÕt need a road, perhaps it will lead to something.
Puffin
If you have to ßy, you want to reduce frontal area to an absolute minimum. One person lying down. But you also want vertical takeoff, so your driveway can be an airport. And you want electric motors, so that the noise wonÕt bother the neighbors. That design is NASAÕs Puffin [Choi 2000]. 
Twin 30 HP electric motors tilt to allow vertical take off and landing, but its horizontal ßight mode is much more efficient than a helicopter. This is still a lot less efficient transportation than PRT or a Lit motorcycle, but if you have to get somewhere quick without roads, this is our favorite. 
Efficient transportation of goods
Because PRT is clean and quiet, it can enter buildings unobtrusively. Because it is computer controlled, it doesnÕt need a passenger to direct it. An assembly line can say ÒI need more raw materialsÓ and a pod delivers raw materials to the beginning of an assembly line. Also, the assembly line can say ÒTake away the finished productÓ. If a store has requested more of the good, it can be delivered directly into the back of the store. If not, the good goes to the warehouse, all in the pod. A pod can transport about a cubic meter. 
For small stuff, we can use drones. Matternet claims they can deliver a kilogram, 10 km in 15 minutes for 24 cents (including capital and operating costs). A newer version can go 20 km. Good for leapfrogging washed-out African roads. Good for leapfrogging urban congestion. Much less energy per payload pound per mile than a car.
An alternative to transporting packages in the sky, is transporting them on the ground in vehicles that donÕt need to carry a person. A general article on DeliveryBots is at [Templeton 2016b]. A particular implementation of this idea is for sidewalk traveling robots by the wrongly named company ÒStarship TechnologiesÓ [Templeton 2015a]. The idea is that small autonomous package carrying robots can roll along sidewalks slowly between a supplier and your cell phone. 
For big stuff, blimps might be the answer. They can be cheaper and use less energy than air transport. They donÕt need roads, nor airports, meaning that delivery doesnÕt need another ÒmodeÓ to get the product from source to destination [Pasternak 2017]. 
Driverless package delivery can save people the time to get stuff, save energy because a person doesnÕt have to be moved, be safer since thereÕs no person in the vehicle and perhaps save on infrastructure. 
Conclusion
There are, undoubtedly, a few uses of transportation we didnÕt cover. If a city or suburb doesnÕt have many roads, a fraction of the colossal savings can be used for the occasional all-terrain vehicle or helicopter. Modern mountain bikes are pretty capable of rough terrain. We can even reduce the need for roads in rural areas, by using advanced ßying machines. Faster travel reduces the time to go places. It also means we can live Òfurther awayÓ without as much a time-penalty, but on cheaper land. Land is the dominate cost of a house, especially once we have 3D printed ones. 
But the biggest wins come from just transporting designs on the net, at the speed of light, to a 3D printer that uses locally available raw materials. In any case, traditional automobiles are headed toward the antique museum. Given global warming, itÕs not a moment too soon.