From: Chen Yixiong, Eric (cyixiong@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Sep 22 2001 - 05:10:07 MDT
Notes: Draft version, probably requiring additional revision. For inclusion into the Theory of Sociologistics (http://sociologistics.webhop.org)
We may not realize it, but today, in the year 2001, we live with an exceptionally primitive transportation system. If you feel a little skeptical, look around your home.
For most people of the developed world, we can easily obtain water and electricity just with the turn of a tap or the flick of a switch. However, we can't obtain transportation in such a similar manner. This issue goes deeper than the counter argument that transportation does not exist in the manner as water (or perhaps electricity) does.
Not too long ago, most homes do not enjoy such convenience in obtaining water. To fetch water, you have to carry a pail (some sort of water containment device), drop it into a water source such as a river or well, and then lug it back to where you need to use the water.
Later, things improved somewhat. You still need pails, but you can get clean water without having to walk for too long. You need to lug your pail to a public water supply point and fill your pail there. Of course, this system also has its problems. For instance, it could still take a long time to lug your pail to and fro. Lugging too many pails can also cause excessive stress and energy expenditures. You would have to queue and wait for people to finish using the tap even though the water supply can more than provide for all of you. Different cities and towns may have different policies on drawing water that can confuse newcomers.
Nowadays, we have a plumbing system that not just provides water to your home, but also removes water-based waste products from your home. Now you do not need to hire people to draw water, or to dispose of waste. You can draw water by yourself easily.
Contrast this with our transportation systems.
- Inefficiency due to Manual Labor
Your buses, planes and trains need people to drive them. This means your ride gets resource intensive and error prone. Humans need rest, make mistakes and often demand higher salaries than you would like to pay them. Yes, there does exist a minority of automated systems, but they exist as a minority with very limited scope and integration.
In addition, humans do not have fast enough reaction time, and a sufficiently large field of awareness to drive at more efficient speeds. One might find it possible to drive at 200 km/hr, but to do so with other similar drivers without accidents on a congested expressway would probably demand a miracle.
- Inefficiency due to Inconvenience
You cannot easily use transportation, unless you own your vehicle. In the olden days, it means that either you dig your own well or use the public water source. Even if you own the vehicle, this does not mean you can use it easily. Imagine having to place one hand continuously on the tap to use it. Unless you get someone else to help out, this places an unnecessary drain on your ability to multitask and thus spend your time efficiently. If you use the public transportation system, then you face the same problem as with public taps.
- Inefficiency due to non-integration
The transportation system does not integrate well with other similar systems. Each system has its idiosyncrasies that prevent a seamless integration with the other. This often means passengers must spend time waiting and transferring between different systems, sometimes having to take a roundabout route to get to where they wish to go.
- Inefficiency due to Safety Concerns
The transportation system operates inefficiently. In air transportation, you must allocate clear buffer zones so that planes do not crash into each other. Road transportation fares no much better.
The traffic rules can sound equally draconian. A systems failure or a prankster can stop a hundred vehicles with a red light, and even if no one obstructs the vehicles, they have to wait for the light to turn green. You cannot drive your vehicle to the maximum speed its specifications allow because you may endanger someone by doing so and also because the traffic police will want to pounce on you for that.
Airplanes can experience weather turbulence that sends it crashing. Rail tracks of poor design can derail trains when overexposed to the searing sun. The risk adds up as you increase the varieties of transportation systems you use, as well as the amount of time you spend in transit.
- Inefficiency due to Design Issues
When a set of traffic lights at an intersection flips red and the other set green, only a certain group of vehicles can travel while the rest must wait. Unless we have a "fly-over", we cannot allow vehicles of both sides to pass seamlessly because they could definitely collide with each other if they attempt to do so. This leads to great inefficiency when stretches of roads experience bursts of vechicles instead of a steady flow.
Pedestrians have the own set of problems when they want to cross the road. If they see no traffic police and low enough traffic, then they could probably cross the road. Otherwise, they will have to walk to a roundabout route to a traffic light, overpass or underpass. These inefficiencies, and the uncertainties involved in the enforcement of rules, and the different sets of rules for different terrorities, will cause problems for road users when one uses the transportation system.
Transportation systems can experience problems that stop its operation. For instance, airplanes can lose the ability to take off in bad weather. Trains may not run if we have experience a risk of landslides. As the number of distinct transportation system we use increases, we will also experience additional chances of such system inoperation.
- User Information Conveyance
The transportation system (or at least land-based ones) does not exchange information with its users. When you sit in your vehicle, you do not know the shortest route to your location. A GPS system coupled to a live traffic news feed that has inconsistent or limited coverage and that uses ambiguous terms provides merely a poor imitation of a better potential system.
Most vehicles don't even have these primitive facilities or use them, so you usually grope in the dark on the knowledge of traffic problems. Vehicles also do not know the best routes to get to where they want in real time, so by the time you hear it on a radio station, you would probably had gotten stuck in heavy traffic that you cannot exit.
This also means that the transportation system cannot take preemptive measures, such as by advising vehicles of the best route to take so as to minimize traffic slowness, until after slowness had already occurred.
- Non-autonomous Transportation systems
An efficient transportation system should have components that can function autonomously, exchanging information between themselves to know the status of an entire system. If an accident or a traffic "jam" occurred in the route they currently take, they ought to know that and recalculate a new route that bypasses the damaged one.
The system may rely on some central arbitrators to help in coordination, but it can also function by itself without such entities in case the arbitrators crease to operate.
How many of our transportation systems have such capabilities today?
- Major Problem: Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Transportation
When we transfer data from one place to another, we can use one or both modes of transportation.
The asynchronous mode pertains to a transmission technique that does not require a common clock between the communicating devices; special characters in the data stream function as timing signals. This means that things can happen at different timings, like a user typing in data at the keyboard.
Meanwhile, if you want to transmit a huge chunk of data from one known place to another, then you should use synchronous mode to get higher efficiency. Because the system already knows the timing, source and destination, you merely need to send the data. This works for high bandwidth data such as hard disks, CPUs and RAM chips.
The Internet routes data in an asynchronous manner, because
1) One cannot predict from where, to where and when someone would require data
2) The data flows from different places, though through a similar backbone link, to different places. They don't go only to a fixed number of known places at known times. To design a synchronous system would require a lot of data transfers, buffering and rerouting, an impossibly inefficient design.
Amazingly, we have only synchronous public transportation systems and limited private asynchronous systems. You use a synchronous system when you take a bus train or plane, as this involves moving people in bulk to a known sequence of destinations.
This system has rather low efficiency since people do not necessarily want to go to the place they need directly. Most of the time, they need to switch between different systems, wasting time and consuming unnecessary system resources.
You use an asynchronous system when you own your own vehicle and drive to where you want. Yet this does not have high efficiency because of the "dead weight" of the system.
Since you "own" the vehicle, you can't let others drive on it, therefore you have to park it somewhere when you don't need to use it. This means you have a higher than optimum amount of space allocated to parking, in addition the inability to use the vehicle during large parts of the day and thus inefficiency.
You always have to use the same vehicle and that does not help when that vehicle breaks down, since you can't easily replace it with another.
Why can't we use an asynchronous public transportation system that does away with our roads that date back to the horse-drawn carriages from the ancient civilizations? Why can't we use transportation as easily as we can demand water from our taps and electricity from our wall sockets today?
I hereby propose using an integrated, autonomous EM rail system. This system can move people and goods at up to speeds of a bullet train, from factories and offices directly to your homes and apartment blocks. This system can also link to an extremely long and powerful EM rail gun that allows one to travel over continents at speeds over a few times that of sound via heat shielded pellets fired into precision sub-orbital flights to land on a corresponding decelerator gun at the other end.
This would, in general, obsolete our primitive, disintegrated transportation systems that cause us travel headaches in terms of time needed to travel, and also very importantly, in terms of the uncertainties involved during transportation. In addition, unlike the case of densely packed modules such as airplanes, one runs much lower risk of hijacking, or terrorists taking control or destroying the "control" stations for malicious purposes.
Imagine the scenario:
1) We can have our personalized "cab" arriving in front of our doorsteps within half a minute to deliver us automatically to where we need.
2) Instead of making multiple reroutes via different transportation systems to get to where we want, we let the system take care of itself by locating the fastest route possible. We can get to where we want as easily as we make a phone call.
3) We could send a parcel to another person as easily as we can make a phone call, at rather low costs. We can also optionally track the process of its delivery over the transportation network.
4) We no longer need to worry about traffic rules, care ownership and alcoholically doused drivers. The system can work by itself quite fine, even in the event of the Central Coordinators failing (but with a correspondingly reduced efficiency).
This transportation system will truly revolutionize both local and global transportation, if implemented. Our current transportation and delivery system, with its massive inefficiencies, will not suffice for continual use into the 21st century. We must seriously consider alternatives, such as this proposal.
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