The Smarter Earth Institute

Transportation

The world, and particularly the USA has a many serious and rapidly approaching problems. One of the most serious problems we face is that of transport.

Society today is totally reliant on transport. For example, most American cities have no more than a 3 day supply of food. A failure anywhere in the long supply lines would result in hardship and even death. Oil is of course critical to current transport systems.

We already know that oil is so critcal to modern economies that a small shortage in supply causes massive increases in cost. The most optimistic scenarios put serious oil shortages at less than 11 years away. No alternative technologies exist to manage supply chains - or indeed to fuel alternatives, and we know that building alternatives will take massive supplies of energy (from oil because that is what we have) and time. Both are likely to be in short supply in the near future. We need to be constructing alternatives now to have any hope of avoiding a collapse in society caused by a failure of transportation systems. When we look for alternatives, we must take into account time to produce, the energy cost of the systems, and ideally any solutions should result in a reduction in the rate of rapid increase in CO₂ and other greenhouse gases we are producing. Fortunately these equations tend to be interlinked.

When we examine our transport modes in terms of energy efficiency, we perform the calculations based on direct fuel efficiency or the amount of fuel to transport a standard mass a standard distance (technically sfc or specific fuel consumption). Today this is measured in grams of fuel per tonne km. The same calculation allows us to calculate, for carbon based fuels, the amount of greenhouse gas produced per tonne km.

Here is a table reflecting transport processes ordered by grammes per tonne kilometer.

*Estimation of 3.2 grams CO2 per gram fuel

And the same data represented in a chart:

What seems clear is that we have been focusing our efforts in the wrong places! There are no airships currently in service. Indeed the last and best long range cargo airships seen by the world were destroyed on Hitler's orders shortly before WW II. We can and should be focusing on what and how we can bring airships back into general use. Meanwhile aircraft, which use nearly 500 times more fuel and require massive sponsorship in the form of expensive airports requiring vast amounts of concrete (and thus energy, money and greenhouse gas production) have received vast subsidies from society. Indeed, the second best mode of transport in terms of fuel per tonne km and flexibility, the train, has received less assistance from the US government in all the years of railway operation than airlines have receved per year since 2002. In much of the world, railways have another advantage in that they have been electified for decades, and thus are far more fuel flexible than in North America where long distance trains are hauled by diesel electric units. Shipping has also been regarded as a poor cousin to air transport, despite the fact that it can be as economical as trains when navigable water access exists. The requirement for navigable water has made it more cost effective to move goods by truck which allow local deliveries with less handling even at the expense of requiring far more energy.

However it is in the car and truck freight market where most of our energy - and subsidies have flowed. Vast highway systems cover much of the planet. These required a massive investment of energy and capital, not possible until we were able to tap fossil fuels and as fossil fuels become less available, these monstrosities will no longer be maintainable. Interestingly, for North America, the cost of roads has been subsidized by taxes and paid for by all road users, the vast amount of the funding beeing provided by private drivers, where a single correctly loaded truck imposes as much wear and tear on a road as some 3,500 to 4,000 cars, while railway operators have had to fund their lines for themselves. This might go someway to explaining why the USA entered the twentieth century with the most extensive railway system in the world based on line miles per capita and yet, by the twentyfirst century virtually none of this system remained in operation.

Building a railway is expensive. A conventional train track costs almost $ 20 million per kilometer, not including the cost of land. Light rail, as advocated for may intracity projects, at about $10 million per kilometer (again excluding the cost of land) is significantly cheaper, but cannot carry freight, which means that it can only supplement, not replace a road system. In addition, due to the high cost of rail systems and the large amounts of land they require, they are limited in the routes than can be offered. This means that railways are usually seen as one component in an integrated plan.

Can we do better? SmarterEarth thinks that the answer is yes.

If we can move most heavy traffic off the streets, then streets can become smaller and lighter - and thus far cheaper. A street need not even have a fully paved surface if all it has to carry are small light vehicles and occasional service vehicles. This would allow the use of cellular mats able to distribute loads while allowing water to reach the earth to replenish the ground water on which we rely and grass to grow reducing temperatures and improving CO₂ take-up. The reduction in material and increased flexibility will reduce mainainance and promote longevity helping to reduce the energy needed to provide roads and the environmental impact from them.

Cars need to become smaller, cheaper and far more economical. While regenerative electrical drive trains will undouvbtedly become the norm, these will be powered by highly efficient compressed air fuel engines which offer the potential to dramatically reduce fuel use and pollution, while their long lives will provide this without the high embedded costs of battery storage systems. Already the partnership between Moteur Development International (MDI) of Europe and Tata Motors of India is leading the way in this direction, but much more remains to be done.

The way to moving heavy traffic off the streets is to establish light monorail systems designed to carry freight containers as well as passenger traffic. SmarterEarth has created an illustrative deployment of one such system. The rail would be formed of pultruded fiber reinfoced concrete supplied in 15m lengths (the longest able to be delivered using conventional trucking equipment) and intended to be errected using hangars from machine installed, lightweight, fiber reinforced concrete poles. Each rail has embedded aluminum coils to interact with electromagnets and permanent magnets in a Halbach array on the load carriers, serving to deliver power, providing suspension and drive thrust reaction. All guidance decisions are made by the carriers which would network with one another and the rails to prevent collisions and move guideway sections.