Transportation Infrastructure in 50 years

Travis

Misanthrope of the Mountains
Travis
Joined
Mar 31, 2007
Messages
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I have two visions:

Version where everyone works together) Air travel is very expensive due to rising fuel prices and is mostly reserved for trans-oceanic trips. City to city travel is otherwise done by fast electric trains. Within cities commutes are done on electric cars or on vastly expanded heavy rail/light rail systems.

Version where conservatives ruin everything) Air travel is super expensive but is the only option for most intercity travel due to a lack of electric trains. Thus most people cannot travel between cities at all. Within cities hybrid/electric cars abound for those that can afford them. As there is very little commuter rail, subways or light rail there exists vast ghettos of people unemployed simply because they cannot afford any way to get to work.


How do you think it will be?
 
Wouldn't diesel trains still use far less fuel per person for city-to-city travel than airplanes? I don't see why train travel would be impractical if intercity electric trains didn't exist.

And why would buses and non-hybrid cars not exist? Some countries already use CNG to power these vehicles, and CNG is easily produced from coal rather than oil. (It can also be produced from decaying vegetable matter, as it's mostly methane.)
 
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Version where technology actually advances, and people continue to be much the same as they are now: Telecommuting and telepresence dominate all other travel options. Planes remain the solution of choice for people who absolutely, positively have to be there in person.

Increased joblessness, a growing welfare state, and a general lack of better options elsewhere mean that more people stay at home anyway, so even traveling to visit family stops happening so much. Some people still take road trips in their electric cars, though.

Trains and, increasingly, zeppelins, become the new cruise ships, redefining a kind of "staycation" where the journey is the destination. California becomes a major tourist attraction, where weeks-long train rides offer visitors access to a growing number of state parks and nature preserves. Many such travelers pay their way with government vouchers. The program is seen as a way to expand the horizons of a lower class that is increasingly herded into optimally-regimented metropolises modeled after San Francisco (already a pioneer in this field). The middle class, by this time, is no more. (The upper class, whose modes of travel do not concern us here, consist of those few industrialists, media barons, Internet billionaires, and party apparatchiks who have been clever enough to ensure that their business, and their political donations, align sufficiently with the will of the people state to remain somewhat in control of their own destinies.
 
Another option. People live and work in massive skyscrapers. Most people live near where they work so do not need cars. Bicycles are common. Fast electric trains transport people who need to travel between cities. There are areas which used to have houses, but is now either farmland or converted back to forrest.
 
Marasmusine said:
I foresee everyone having personal flying cars and jetpacks.
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What kind of mileage to you foresee these flying cars and jetpacks getting?

This commercially available jetpack requires 5.3 gallons of H2O2 fuel for a 33 second flight with a top speed of 77 mph. That's 7.5 gallons per mile, or 0.13 miles per gallon. (Plus you have to stop to refuel every half a minute.)

(My web search got lots of hits for Jet Pack International which was announcing the release of a jetpack with a possible range of 10 miles sometime "next year". But given that these announcements date back to 2007 and there's still no sign of this jetpack coming out, I doubt it ever will.)

As for flying cars, the closest we'll ever get to those will be autogyros like this one...

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You can fly it through the air or ride it on the road. Apparently you can buy the same model shown in the video as a kit for just US$37,195 (link). I haven't been able to find any figures for what kind of mileage it gets.

Here's a slightly more car-like roadable autogyro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzVVXNMi7Q8

Here's some older flying cars, going all the way back to 1917: http://www.stormclimb.com/2011/08/26/a-brief-historical-introduction-to-the-flying-car
 
Travis said:
I have two visions:

Version where everyone works together) Air travel is very expensive due to rising fuel prices and is mostly reserved for trans-oceanic trips. City to city travel is otherwise done by fast electric trains. Within cities commutes are done on electric cars or on vastly expanded heavy rail/light rail systems.

Version where conservatives ruin everything) Air travel is super expensive but is the only option for most intercity travel due to a lack of electric trains. Thus most people cannot travel between cities at all. Within cities hybrid/electric cars abound for those that can afford them. As there is very little commuter rail, subways or light rail there exists vast ghettos of people unemployed simply because they cannot afford any way to get to work.


How do you think it will be?
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An otherwise intriguing and thoughtful OP let down by a petty jab. Your vision is presented as either "everyone works together" or "conservatives ruin everything." Not announcing the fallacy there. Save it for another sub-forum please.
 
One problem I always see in relation to electric vehicles/trains and all becoming our salvation (perfectly feasible at a local level, btw, if we get our act together in time) is how the hell we'll replace those diesel trucks that haul monster loads into the wilderness, and the vast excavators and mining machines that we'll surely still need way beyoind 50 years from now. Because I can't picture that range and power coming from batteries.

Bio-diesel for reserved functions such as those?
 
Version where oil becomes increasingly scarce, eventually doubling or tripling in price and making alternative fuels competitive without massive government subsidies. Society transitions to a biodiesel-based industry with great hue and cry, but not much actual disturbance. Oil and Ag use any price fluctuations during this transition to lobby for and receive subsidies anyway, but that's just business as usual.

To the end consumer food is somewhat pricier, winter fruit is still available but expensive again, really long commutes pose a financial hardship as well as a time sink, but no overt signs of the apocalypse will present themselves.
 
In 50-75 years? Uneven advance towards multimodal people transportation mainly based on electricity, except in air transport mostly used for >1,500 km trips and sea transport of merchandise.

In modal transportation you use a public or your private vehicle by calling it with your personal GPS device and informing your destination. Then the vehicle will run by itself, very fast and very close to other vehicles, as the whole flow will be controlled by advanced technical means. If your destination is another city you probably will be "consolidated" with other passengers on a coach -sometimes with the very vehicle that brought you to the terminal- or on a plain through swift and almost "seamless" transitions. In some cases you'll pass migration within the vehicle itself.

Of course the system won't cover the whole world by 2075 as it will be costly and a lot of debate will arise. Pedestrians and property owners will object some urban changes and the cities will probably see pedestrian areas growing and the creation of some corridors where the curbs will be replaced by barriers so the transport units will be able to run full speed. There will be a trend to two-level urban development.

Short distance transportation will prevail as a lot of activities will demand less physical transportation. It'll be mostly electrical as new light batteries in very light vehicles will be charged opportunely in different moments of the day to take advantage of hourly over-supply from renewable sources or low demand of nuclear ones.

Of course the evolution of the transportation system won't be free of bumps -pun intended-. In fact, millions and millions of people will die, the same way some 30 or 40 millions already have died in a little over a century of car transportation. But you know, men don't care about life safety when novelty, comfort and the illusion of empowerment is on the plate.
 
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I think cars will still dominate personal transportation in the US in the next 50 years with New York being the possible exception.

There's an AI traffic control system being studied in the UK now which should be more responsive to real time traffic conditions.
 
I envisage fleets of autonomous electric road vehicles of varying sizes. Some are public, some are privately owned. All are aware of the others and network together in phalanxes on main roads.

For long distances, high-speed rail or hyperloop.
 
So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.
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So there is no hope then.

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Well, that was a very well considered reply to the contributions of other posters in this thread, Travis.
 
Something unforeseen will come up to change everything we think is moving along logically.

If someone had asked that same question in 1950, who would've answered that the most dramatic change in global transportation would be goods and not people and would be the humble "container".

Something like that may very well come along for this half-century.
 
Travis said:
So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.
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So there is no hope then.

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Why such a gloomy vision?

In fact, many of us have envisaged similar futures than yours -the one not spoiled by "conservatives", whatever those are-. But transportation is going the same way as telephony, that is, not Epcot like holographic phones to be used in homes but Google glass like smartphones, so it's not needed a lot of railways with trains running at 350 mph. And air transport will be more expensive, but it still remains the issue of human time and its value. Hovercrafts over the Atlantic are not a good replacement for air transportation, nor airships are, as category 4 hurricanes will develop faster than those vessels can shun them.
 
Travis said:
So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.

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So there is no hope then.

So there is no hope then.
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So there is no hope then.

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I know how much you love the idea of high speed rail, and, to be sure, there's a lot to love there. I also know that I've been a bit hard on you about that, but I hope you understand that I don't get any particular thrill out of stomping on peoples' dreams. Electric cars aren't quite as sexy, but they would certainly play a vital role in your first vision of the future. I just think... well, as Yogi Berra said, the future ain't what it used to be. I think that's something a lot of us need to start getting real about. I see us having about enough cheap oil for just one more round of major infrastructure investment, and it's important that we don't misallocate those resources by creating a transportation infrastructure that isn't well suited to overall societal conditions. Another quote often attributed to Yogi Berra is "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." Unfortunately, that's exactly the trick called for here.

As I've said before, I think a better place to start would be with upgrading our existing rail systems. Whether the payload is cargo or people, trains are the most energy efficient means we have of moving them from one place to another. Granted, the first thing a passenger rail system would have to be is fast if it were to have any hope of stealing customers away from the air travel industry, but that assumes that air travel continues to be affordable, and neither of your visions allows for that anyway (quite correctly, in my opinion). If super fast travel between cities is beyond the reach of all but the super rich, then -- following a (possibly difficult) adjustment period -- that becomes the new norm. It won't happen without a great deal of initial resistance, but people do eventually reconfigure their lifestyles to accommodate changing conditions.

Expectations play an important role in behavior, especially at the level of entire societies, with such factors as communal reinforcement exerting their considerable influence. I'd venture to guess that by about age ten, the average citizen of the U.S. has already logged far more travel miles than their counterparts from two hundred years ago could ever expect to see in a lifetime. We automatically take this to be a good thing: broader horizons means broader awareness and all that. Taking advantage of greater opportunities nearly always means being willing to relocate, and many of us do this often. We may have a dim recognition of the fact that all of this comes at a price of a reduced sense of connectedness to place and community, but it's a price we're willing to pay. Who wants to spend their whole life looking at the same damn mountain anyway (or meadow, or house across the street, or whatever it happens to be)? We crave fresh stimuli, and rearranging the furniture every once in a while just doesn't get it. The greatest ambition for the son of the village blacksmith may have been to follow in his father's footsteps, enjoying the security that goes along with that, but the expectation now is that sons will experience greater opportunities than their fathers. It is assumed that "upward mobility" is very likely to involve mobility in a literal as well as a figurative sense.

My daily routine once included hours each day in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic, sometimes moving at 60 or 65 mph. It sometimes struck me that this was a form of mass insanity, but I could quell those troubling thoughts simply by observing that since there were so many of us doing it, it must make some kind of sense. I don't think that way anymore.

I now regard as mass insanity (or at least mass ignorance) the notion that we can maintain -- through any means -- a way of life that was designed around the use of personal automobiles to the extent that ours was. It's not a simple matter of finding new ways to get people (and goods) from one building to another. The problem has to do with the way the people are deployed upon the land; with the reasons they find a need to move from one building to another with such frequency; with the fact that so many of the buildings are in the wrong places, and that they were built for purposes that have little meaning in a society that does not have (or act as if it had) an endless supply of cheap oil with which to power personal vehicles.
 
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