<DrumBeat: June 20, 2008 The Oil Drum Saudi Arabia - opening the tap?>

95 comments on Have we passed “Peak Travel?”

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BillJames on June 20, 2008 - 9:54pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I like your equation. It gave me a couple of ideas.

Mobility, like education and free speech, is an aspect of liberty. We need to equate relative to what is important. Here is a first cut at such a formula:

Mobility = Want (hope, desire) + Need - Access Penalty - Energy Penalty - Time Penalty - Distance Penalty (maybe)

In designing transportation systems, we need to emphasize the positive and drive out the negatives.

The distance penalty may not be needed as time and energy penalties likely already include the costs of distance. There are practical technologies today that make distance of less importance. You could take a ship to Europe and enjoy the travel as its own reward; the time penalty would account for the negatives.

The same point can be made for riding a bike. The trip can add to need and want.

It will require time and effort to re-tool transportation but there are alternatives. Other mobility technologies such as ET3 can take the energy and time out of travel. JPods, Vectus, ULTra, etc... can take out the access and energy penalties.

What do you think?

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Sheldon H on June 20, 2008 - 10:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Bill,

Yes there are alternatives. Unfortunately, they don't include your "GadgetBahn" technologies. Do you reasonably see for instance a highly complicated, pervasive network of podmobiles on elevated, at grade or subway podtracks being easier to maintain in a post peak oil world than a concrete, or cobblestone or asphalt surface accomodating bicylces or very light electric vehicles requiring no computer gadgetry for control headed to the nearest mass transport node. That's your competition!!!!

I think Alan and others have already spelled it out for you yet you refuse to acknowledge reality.

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BillJames on June 21, 2008 - 11:46am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

We'll see, we could be deluded but the "GadgetBahn" claim seems an emotional decision.

Cell phones in 1984 would have been claimed as "GadgetBahn".
I am sure the Wright Brothers and Ford were told something similiar.

This quote, written by Dr Patrick Driscoll, is taken from West Point's Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management.

In fact, one of the most significant failings of the current U.S. transportation system is that the automobile was never thought of as being part of a system until recently. It was developed and introduced during a period that saw the automobile as a standalone technology largely replacing the horse and carriage. So long as it outperformed the previous equine technology, it was considered a success. This success is not nearly so apparent if the automobile is examined from a systems thinking perspective. In that guise, it has managed to fail miserably across a host of dimensions. Many of these can be observed in any major US city today: oversized cars and trucks negotiating tight roads and streets, bridges and tunnels incapable of handling daily traffic density, insufficient parking, poor air quality induced in areas where regional air circulation geography restricts free flow of wind, a distribution of the working population to suburban locations necessitating automobile transportation, and so on. Had the automobile been developed as a multilateral system interconnected with urban (and rural) transportation networks and environmental systems, U.S. cities would be in a much different situation than they find themselves in today.

What is important here is not that the automobile could have been developed differently, but that in choosing to design, develop and deploy the automobile as a stand alone technology, a host of complementary transportation solutions to replace the horse and buggy were not considered.

I am pretty sure the will be a mix of alternative transport solutions. I would recommend letting anyone try anything they are willing to risk their money on. Reality will sort out what is practical.

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oregon7 on June 21, 2008 - 3:38pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I like your proposal. But I like any effort to reduce complex problems to simple equations! :-)

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95 comments on Have we passed “Peak Travel?”

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