Goodbye Zoom

London, England a taxi cab in the twenty first century, has a slower average speed around town than a horse drawn carriage from the nineteenth century.

I live near Toronto, Ontario which is as pro-car a connurbation as you would care to be gridlocked in. To the north of the city near the airport, the18-lane 401 highway carries 431,900 cars and trucks an hour. Automobiles and auto-related industries drive seventeen percent of our local economy. When that much money talks, no-one walks. Certainly no-one is actively encouraged to take public transit by virtue of its user friendly design, reliability, punctuality and low cost. It’s existence is grudged.

If you live in one of the cloned communities of modern 'burbia, a car, or more likely some species of urban assault vehicle, is a necessity because the nearest corner shop is on a corner ten minutes drive away.

If you have no option but to commute to work and drive for supplies, your car, rather than a necessity, can be seen as a mandatory $25,000+ added penalty for the poor design choices of the planners.

In Canada we have 22 million automobiles and light trucks on our roads. Every year, each one churns out more than its own weight in carbon dioxide. That can be anywhere between 1000 and 3000 kilograms. To make some sense of so much invisible gas, imagine a chunk of dry ice weighing 2000kg landing on your Lincoln Slaughterer SUV. I’d pay to see that.

We’re forced into a fairly intimate relationship with cars one way or the other.

We’re forced into a fairly intimate relationship with cars one way or the other. I however need my car for pyschological reasons. 

The public highways are one of the rare venues where I'm allowed to exert a large measure of control. On the road, what happens next is usually up to me. When I'm driving I just go right ahead and exercise my expert judgement and superb driving skills without asking for permission first. The rest of my life isn't usually like that.

Nor is it as private. My car provides me with a private space away from all you idiot drivers out there. It's one of the few places outside where I can de-booger my nose and sing. I'm not alone in being alone. Look at how many cars have only one person in them, you get ten points if you ever see a full wagon.

My car provides me with a private space away from all you idiot drivers out there.

Zoom. As it ever was so it shall be; the more money you have, the faster and further you go. Consider space tourist number 1. Dennis Tito paid $20 million for sufficient velocity to completely esape Earth's surly bonds. More of Tito's peers will undoubtedly follow but conceivably it will be demand for zero-gravity sex that eventually makes escape velocity affordable for unmillionaires.

At the bottom of the gravity well, new materials and improved computer modeling will eke out incremental speed gains for the usual toys of the rich simultaneously increasing their coefficient of envy.

Early-adopters may sink their wealth into personal submarines. Once the military stops playing torpedoes with them, the exotic effects of supercavitation will allow a submarine to rocket through the deeps freed from hydrodynamic drag by a teardrop-shaped bubble of gas shrouding the vessel from bow to stern. Aircars and personal helicopters ? No doubt we'll see and hear more of them whining through the skies. While the US remains allergic to sonic booms though, personal supersonic travel will have to wait, Rent-a-MIG notwithstanding.

In contrast, impecunious planet huggers will travel markedly slower, propelled by technology that's not necessarily new but ripe. We'll use novel fuels too but whether the speed of our collective peripateticism will increase is a different proposition.

52% of the world's population use the bicycle as their primary means of transport. It's cheap, reliable and tiring. In the short term, a hearty breakfast would speed them along. However some help up the steep bits might encourage less enthusiastic riders, hence the electrical Bicycle Lift; essentially a pay-to-ride bike escalator for hilly city streets. BTS TransGlide 2000 proposes elevated and enclosed urban cycleways with electric fans ensuring the wind is forever at your back.

52% of the world's population use the bicycle as their primary means of transport.

But even if the world's bicyclists could afford motorised wheels, that's still no guarantee they'll arrive any sooner. The increasing migration to personal motorised transport is befouling the streets of many economies. 

Bangkok loses 34% of it's GDP to all that productive time that’s idled away in traffic. In fact, if all the vehicles in all the world's traffic jams were lined up end to end...oh, too late, they already are.

Money for transport infrastructure, road or rail, is usually channeled into the corridors of wealth between conurbations where large populations can theoretically repay the investment. However in rural regions of Asia, India, South America and Africa where per capita income is around $5000 a year, buses and local trains are, and will continue to be, the principal means of mobility. Tomorrow's local buses and trains could be engineered for greater speeds but reliability and cheapness will be more highly valued.
Inevitably rural mobility comes a distant second to demands for faster urban and inter-city transportation. There's not much money to be made moving the poor; the result is a two-speed country.

As their population and average income increases, developing economies will generate an increasing share of global traffic volume. However, unless inequalities of wealth and income are magically erased, most of the world's population will never buy an SUV or minivan no matter how many cupholders it boasts.

More people are destined to fly but there will always be more of the cheap seats than the fast. Only twenty five meters long, Hypersoar aims to fly a handful of passengers at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 12, skimming off the outer atmosphere in series of hops. No two points on the globe will be more than two hours apart. Those with money to burn will fly at a gas guzzling Mach 0.95 in Boeing's proposed "Sonic Cruiser" while those on a budget fly en masse in the slower 550 seat Airbus A380. 

For those of us accustomed to breathing yesterday's air in cattle class, there awaits in the wings NASA and McDonnell Douglas' blended wing concept. All wing, no fuselage and seating eight hundred. However the concept relies on technology predicted to be available in 2015. Luggage should arrive by 2017.

The rapidly approaching concept of free flight allows airline pilots to fly almost as the crow flies. Flying in a virtual "Keep Out" zone and fully aware of the whereabouts of nearby aircraft, pilots in free flight will be able to dodge bad weather and take shortcuts outside the traditional airlanes. Sooner than ever before, you'll be stuck in terminal winglock over the airports with yet more aircraft vying for a landing slot.

If the purpose of business travel is to conduct face-to-face meetings, airlines are in the 'long distance interpersonal communication facilitation' business. Instead of expensive aircraft airlines might be well-advised to invest in tele-immersion technology and move their customers' bits rather than their atoms. Tele-immersion, video-conferencing's smarter younger brother, strives to create a satisfactory digital illusion of a face-to-face meeting, complete with steely gazes, dispensing with all that tedious mucking about in aeroplanes.

The pace of your future railtravel will be contingent on your continent. Once railways stitched North America together. Nowadays everyone drives or flies. With a population spread out over such a vast area, it's cheaper to build roads and cars; better to serve the 'burbs, better to support the oil and auto industry, better for trucking freight.

Currently only Amtrak's Acela Express serving the Boston, New York, Washington corridor offers a ground-based alternative. Although capable of 150 mph, the Acela Express rarely does so having to share the aging tracks with freight trains and swing bridges. While Federal funding for highways and aviation increases, Amtrak is mandated to wean itself off the governmental teat and so rail development languishes. With the political will stuck in the Oil Age, there's unlikely to be a great renaissance of rail travel in North America until the wells dry up.

Meanwhile Europe and Canada are exporting expertise and matériel to South Korea, Taiwan and Australia for their high speed regional and inter-city rail travel. China aims to link Beijing and Shanghai with a dedicated high speed line of its own making. 

In more densely populated Europe where the political climate is more friendly, rail increasingly competes with aircraft. For instance, France's TGV, Train Grand Vitesse, runs commercially at 300 km/h (186mph) but is capable of 515 km/h (320 mph). Europe's expanding rail network provides a high speed alternative to air and car travel to a growing market.

Will faster trains roll or float ? Whether big steel wheels will be replaced by magnetically levitating superconductive coils depends on what maglev technology delivers. In Japan, magnetically levitated trains reached 550 km/h but only on test tracks. Conventional trains have been coaxed to 520 km/h and engineers don't need to reinvent the wheel to do it. The appeal of maglev technology, such as Germany's Transrapid, is the lack of moving parts. Non-contact technology reduces mechanical wear and tear on the vehicle and the guideway. Consequently maglev's are quieter than their steel-wheeled cousins, an attractive attribute when hurtling through built up areas. Boosters also claim it's cheaper to move bums by maglev than by other equally fast transportation systems.

But tracks, concrete or steel, gobble up scarce real estate. Ducking the issue, Swissmetro plans underground rail tunnels operating a partial vacuum to reduce air resistance for their 400 km/h maglev trains.

More of our transportation within and between cities could move underground, not replacing existing modes of transport but complementing them. Although relatively costly to install, tunneled transport is fast, quiet, reliable, cheap to operate and reduces congestion and local pollution. Even a modest tunnel such as the 1.2 km air-cushion system in Serfaus, Austria is effective; bringing skiers into the village but not their cars.

Other local initiatives reducing the need to drive will emerge - increasingly thoughtful urban planning being one of them. Engineered solutions such as cableways, monorails, moving walkways and automated public transit like Switzerland's Serpentine may contribute to our mobility and quality of life but not necessarily our haste.

There's no shortage of clever ideas to move us around; from aircraft-like ekranoplanes skimming rapidly and low over water on a cushion of air to elevators that go sideways. What really slows us down is the friction of implementation, logistical and emotional. The only way to separate today's drivers from their automobiles would be to pry the car keys from their cold, dead fingers. Accordingly automobile use in North America has yet to peak, ergo more gridlock. So change, like traffic, will be slow, generational in nature.

In two generations time though, around 2050, the oil runs out. But cities aren't going to conveniently rebuild to accommodate new transport technologies and policies, however enlightened. Barring unexpected tectonic activity, the sprawling 'burbs will stay where we put them. We'll still need the versatility of the car but in a markedly more benign form.

It's all that stopping and starting that slows you down. I'd rather arrive home sooner in a vehicle which maybe went slower but got home without stopping so much.

But if I'm going to be tooling around town at 25 or 45 mph, I'd rather be driven than drive. Isn't controlling lots of moving things what GPS, broadband wireless and neural networks would be good at ?
But I blame Benz. He bolted a 0.9 hp engine to the back of a horse buggy in 1886 and cars have been the same basic shape ever since. Car designers still haven't got beyond designing horseless carriages where we sit side by side with a Surrey on the top.

In Toronto 40 percent of Toronto's land is now given over to accomodating the consequences of that particular broadbeamed seating arrangement. Figures may vary in your city.

So it's time for inline cars. Half the width of regular cars and who has passengers anyway? Oh alright perhaps two seats. And some trunk room.

With inline cars, two lanes become four and as long as everybody drives carefully it'll be fine.

With most journeys solo jaunts, vehicles seating one or two people inline instead of abreast are emerging. To provide the flexibility of personal transport with the efficiency of mass transit, dual-mode systems such as RUF and the HiLoMag concept are proposed. A narrow electric car scoots around town then, for longer trips, drives onto a guiderail and links with others of its species to form a caravan controlled by computer and drawing power from the rail. Again, velocity may become a victim of efficiency.

There is virtue in slowness. Less energy is used, less material is needed to ensure safety and despite the lower top speeds, commuters yet unborn may still enjoy shorter travelling times. The trick is to reduce the lurching stop and go that defines the contemporary commute. A necessary step will be the computer as chauffeur. By surrendering control of the vehicle to a network capable of managing the complex dynamics involved, the turbulent flow of vehicles could be tamed thus increasing average speeds but not top speeds. By letting go of the steering wheel travellers may arrive sooner by going slower.

There's a sign ahead. It reads; hello future, good-bye zoom.