Future Perfect What next? And other impossible questions

4. The Future of Transport - 2027: Full Speed Ahead

I am hurrying through the city streets to pick up a car. It’s a typically turbulent spring day in 2027, the weather far less calm and predictable than in the twentieth century. No vehicles are standing kerbside, not even in the suburbs: few people own cars now, as fuel has become too expensive and we cannot afford the space to park them. I come to a CarPool. It offers two choices. One is a nifty two-seater, even smaller than the abbreviated carlets which appeared twenty years ago, driving around town as if their rear ends have been chopped off. The other choice is a six-seater with ample carrying space for family or goods. I take out a smart card-actually an electronic prong (a Hypertel) attached to my mobile phone-which registers both my account and my sobriety. The card opens the car and automatically charges my bank, and off I go.

The traffic is slight. Most commuters now take mass transit. I am driving because I want to go somewhere not served by buses or trains, to make a few detours and end up in Canberra, where I’ll simply leave my carlet in another CarPool and walk away. This system has several advantages. The vehicles have 92 per cent usage (instead of the 97 per cent idleness of old); they are well maintained and run on state-of-the-art alcohol batteries weighing a trifle. Parking fees are nonexistent, and my only other direct cost is the road charge, now automatic and universal and graded electronically from expensive motorways to cheaper suburban streets.

Few miss the cars they used to own. It just became too difficult to run them and to put up with the ever-increasing restrictions. Now, in 2027, if we do want to drive occasionally, we have all the luxury of a hire car with the accessories of our choice (GPS, pods, child seats). CarPools are as abundant as post offices once were.

Fantasy? Of course! Would Australians (or Americans, or the newly affluent Chinese) put up with no car ownership? Not unless some shock makes us reassess our mad, 50-year-old affair with the private car. My parents did not own one (not so unusual in the mid-twentieth century), and in 2005 between 20 per cent and 24 per cent of households in Sydney and Melbourne did without. Only about three generations have taken car dependence for granted, so it would not be strange to see some change as circumstances alter-as they must.

The car is an odd piece of engineering. Unlike the bicycle, which converts energy into momentum with 95 per cent efficiency, with the car, as Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute likes to point out, ‘only 13 per cent of its fuel energy even reaches the wheels’. Most energy disappears in the form of heat or noise, or is dissipated by accessories like airconditioning and windscreen wipers. After warming the tyres, says Lovins, ‘just 6 per cent of the fuel energy actually accelerates the car’. Nearly two tonnes of machinery to shift less than 0.08 tonnes of you.

The possibilities for improvement of my carlets are enormous. Polymers will make much lighter bodies; hydrogen fuel cells and long-awaited lithium-ion batteries will offer independence from oil. All will combine to make the hypercar Lovins has been enthusing about for the past decade a real possibility.

Electric cars are already performing mechanical miracles, as Arnold Schwarzenegger discovered recently when he drove the monster from Tesla Motors in California. ‘Faster than a Ferrari’, it reaches 100 kph ‘in just four seconds’; travels 400 km after being charged from your wall socket and, according to the Economist, is greener than a petrol-powered car.

Tesla’s electric sports car has lithium-ion batteries and a carbon-fibre body and is about four times more efficient in terms of fuel equivalence than the average American vehicle. With such a performance standard in 2007, it should not be hard to make it even more impressive by 2027.

But what about the downside of cars? They will kill two people every minute, worldwide, by 2027 if present trends continue; they already kill five people in Australia every day. A study done by Professor Barry Bloom of Harvard University and WHO (the World Health Organization) shows that, by 2020, ‘road traffic accidents would be the third biggest cause of death or permanent injury in the world’. Already they are the second biggest cause of deaths of young men after AIDS! Bigger than warfare.

They eat up 40 per cent of the surface of cities such as Sydney and Los Angeles and produce 8 per cent of our greenhouse gases. ‘Transportation consumes 70 per cent of US oil and generates a third of its carbon emissions,’ notes Lovins in Scientific American. And, to add one of my favourite horror statistics: traffic jams cost America $US100 billion per annum ($A13.8 billion for Australia), which rises to $US170 billion if you add the cost of accidents.

The odd thing about the car, as the British conservative magazine The Spectator once pointed out in an editorial, is that it is the last bastion of socialism. While masquerading as the ultimate symbol of free-enterprise individualism, it requires a colossal subsidy from taxes in the form of infrastructure (about $6.2 billion a year in Australia). Congestion charges in cities and widespread electronically tagged prices for using roads must follow, and will drastically diminish freelance motoring.

But will nations such as China catch up with our own bad example? Not yet, says Professor Peter Newman, of Murdoch University in Perth. He calculates that ‘the 200 million Chinese who moved into cities over the last ten years use around 2 gigajoules of transport per person’. This compares with 30 GJ for a Sydney dweller and 103 GJ for someone in Atlanta (USA). ‘Thus the 200 million Chinese use less fuel than one Atlanta or four Sydneys.’ This despite each of these two cities boasting only around four million people!

What is the secret? One obvious factor is that the Chinese are opting to live in high-rise towers while the Atlantans spread themselves over the lowest urban density in the world, courtesy of cars. Yet the average car trip in Australia (over 55 per cent of them) is less than 5 km- which, as Sally Campbell, of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Sustainability Institute, notes, is a bike ride of about twenty minutes, just the amount recommended to keep the typical Australian fit and healthy.

But there is another side to the Chinese ‘miracle’. Here is Kirsty Needham in her book, A Season in Red: My great leap forward into the new China : ‘One of the most confronting aspects of daily life was the complete disregard for rules, or human mortality, on the roads. A nation of novice drivers had been let loose en masse as car ownership suddenly became within reach of the middle class.’ On one bus trip she passed three ‘horrific accidents as brake failures sent coaches smashing into cars… When we finally passed the crumpled shell of the bus, it was a sickening sight. The bodies of the dead were trapped inside… I saw a woman who looked like she was sleeping, but with the eyes open, slumped against the window. An empty face staring through the glass.’

Red lights in Beijing are ignored, even on pedestrian crossings. ‘Humans were expected to leap out of the way’ And she gives figures for the experiment with car ownership in China that we can expect to see matched across Asia: ‘Traffic was now the leading cause of death for Chinese aged fifteen to forty-five. The WHO estimated 45,000 people were maimed and 600 died every day on the roads in China. Thousands were caught driving without licences or driving drunk in Beijing each year. In Shanghai, a third of traffic accidents were found to be caused by newly licensed drivers.’

And our kids are dying, too.

What if cheap oil runs out? Yes, we can exploit relatively expensive sources like shale and liquefied coal. But costs will be enormous. Planes can’t fly on much other than jet fuel (kerosene) and use vast quantities of it. What will be their prospects twenty or thirty years from now, especially with real concerns about the greenhouse contribution of jets (about 3 per cent of the total, according to the industry)? After the present boom in cheap international travel, could there be a major slump? Could that be why Boeing has invested in the smaller, more versatile 7E7? Could the giant Airbus double-decker, with its 550 seats, prove to be a size commitment too far?

I sat in Boeing’s mock-up of the 7E7 at one of their labs in Seattle. The first thing you notice is the deliberate effort to make you feel that you are really flying in the sky, instead of trying to pretend you are merely in a cramped, earthbound canteen-cum-dormitory. Arched cabin ceilings painted in blue and designed to give an impression of celestial height take away the enclosed, life-in-a-tube sensation, and even the windows are elongated, connecting you to the horizon. It’s more serene and even more natural than our customary flying cattle enclosures. Even the air is clean: ‘As pure as that you’d get from an operating theatre,’ I was told by the smooth-talking Boeing lab chief, who looked like a cross between Clark Gable and Biggies.

But what about those aircraft emissions? While they are only 3 per cent of the carbon total (compared with 22 per cent for ground transport), the effect of these gases is substantial-enhancing greenhouse problems and changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. There is already discussion of changing the preferred altitude of planes to reduce the damage caused by ‘N-trails’, the oxides of nitrogen that pour from their exhausts. There is also talk of ways to reduce delays at take off and landing, both responsible for substantial emissions

So what does the future hold for a means of transport that has determinedly and successfully wooed the budget traveller? The costs of the new draconian security measures and rocketing fuel prices could return air travel to the exclusive option it was 30 years ago. I now approach an international flight with all the enthusiasm I would bring to 24-hour root-canal therapy. I suspect others feel the same, especially with the prospect of having to eschew their books and laptops as on-board restrictions get worse.

There isn’t any other quick option for Australians who want to go overseas, so stoicism may have to go up yet another few notches. But surely fast trains would be a good inter-city alternative, if only governments were prepared to invest in infrastructure? As for the supersonic flying revolution, it now seems further away than ever. Concorde is grounded, and the experiments at the University of Queensland with the Scramjet (at upwards of eight times the speed of sound), though successful, are unlikely to have anybody other than daredevils such as Richard Branson (in vigorous old age) hopping on the promised three-hour flight from Sydney to London.

Private space travel appears more likely. SpaceShipOne has had successful trials in America and two Australians, Wilson da Silva and Alan Finkel of Cosmos magazine, have already booked to be the first Australians to make the seven-hour frolic.

Going to Mars will take much longer, and is likely to be preceded by the landing of an expandable base made from the fuel casings of the spaceship. It is likely that the first venturers will be asked to stay there. Who would want to take a one-way ticket to another planet? Well, Lord Rees, for one. The President of the Royal Society of London told me that making only one journey is safer. Besides, he added, in the old days of exploration, folk were sanguine about not coming home!

Back on Earth: trains first carried passengers in South Wales just over 200 years ago. They flourished in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries; but in Australia and Britain, they’ve since gone backwards. Visitors who come to see us on the South Coast of New South Wales and take the trundler from Sydney cannot believe the time it takes to grind through the short distance. Has no one noticed France ’s TGVs (trains à grande vitesse) or Japan ’s bullet trains, which travel on time, CBD to CBD, and make the plane alternative look ridiculous?

Like Concorde and the Apollo missions to the moon that ended in 1972, modern trains appear to be a dream that faded. Despite our budget surpluses, we are unwilling to invest in infrastructure and railways cost plenty. Yet many of us would be more than willing to sit in the comfort of a TGV that could take us from Melbourne

Future Perfect to Sydney, or Sydney to Brisbane, in four hours-only about one hour longer than the present best estimate of door-to-door trips using air travel. The British Conservatives discovered the promise of better rail travel in 2006, observing that magnetically elevated trains could go at over 500 kph, as they already are doing, experimentally, in Asia. Cut that inter-city link to 50 minutes! In Holland they have the Maglev, part train, part bus- it can switch from ordinary roads to supertracks, run on fuel cells or batteries, and reach speeds of 250 kph.

The Rail Infrastructure Corporation has noted that our spending in 2005 in Australia on such essentials as rail and bridges was $28.5 billion below what it needed to be, and that deft investment in infrastructure would increase Australia ’s productivity by 10 per cent.

What of light trains? Their development in the northern suburbs of Perth appears to have been a howling success. Peter Newman, a professor at Murdoch University and adviser to the Premier of Western Australia, believes commuters will take trains willingly if a) they are faster than cars and b) they come so often that timetables are unnecessary. A UTS study has also found that travellers will opt for public transport if it is convenient, safe and affordable.

What is needed is a revolution based on total costing. Add the fuel, pollution, delays, real-estate costs and trauma, and then consider the option of making buses and trains free. Some studies indicate that the price of tickets covers only their collection. Remember the remarkable cheerfulness and freedom Sydney experienced during the weeks of the Olympic Games? Cars almost invisible, public transport laid on-what could this be like in the long term? Would a short series of experiments of this kind be worth considering? If the petrol price rises and pollution concerns continue, maybe the unthinkable will be tried.

Won’t new fuels come to the rescue? Hydrogen, cars running on water, even solar cars (which manage to glide regularly from Darwin to Adelaide)!

Hydrogen is a real prospect, but distant. It’s an expensive way to produce and distribute energy. A hydrogen economy may not emerge generally until well after 2027. Its contribution by then will be substantial, however, and-so I was assured by Professor Omar Yaghi at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles), one of Popular Science magazine’s Top 10 stars of American science of 2006-hydrogen may flourish as the energy source in laptops and mobile phones before it leaps successfully into transport. Even then, containing costs will be tricky. Geophysicist cum economist Peter Terzakian was quoted in The Australian as saying ‘If all 230 million cars in the US were to switch from petrol to hydrogen, so much electricity would be required to create the hydrogen that 350 new nuclear plants would be needed. Or more than 1000 coal-fired power stations.’

Cars driven by water have turned up regularly as a hot prospect, ever since Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the then Premier of Queensland, drooled over them a generation ago. The idea is a variant on the hydrogen theme: use the electrolysis of water to separate hydrogen and oxygen (as schoolchildren used to see done in science in their first year), harness the hydrogen and expel the oxygen. It may work one day, but don’t expect it to break any land speed records soon.

Diesel, paradoxically, is due for a new golden age- nanoparticle additions, promised by experiments in Oxford, will increase burning and efficiency by 8-10 per cent while removing foul exhaust fumes. Cars running on diesel already offer greater mileage without incurring the large outlays and battery renewal costs of hybrids.

Biofuels have everyone swooning in fresh anticipation (the love affair erupts every fifteen years, to coincide with the latest oil crisis) and the yield could be colossal. Ethanol is an American boondoggle. It is used as a way for politicians in Washington to appease farmers (as brutally enacted in the TV show The West Wing, during primaries in the presidential race). At worst, the fuel requires its equivalent in oil to produce. The best outcome involves using crop residues, so a double benefit is achieved. Dr Timothy Jones, at the University of Arizona at Tucson, has even discussed mining America ’s vast number of landfills, where concentrated organic matter could provide anything from methane to oils. He claims more than 20 per cent of his nation’s fossil fuels could be replaced in this way. Ron Oxburgh says this source could one day be enough to run America ’s entire fleet of cars and trucks.

Ron is a sheer delight as a friend. He’s as eminent as you can get without being embalmed. House of Lords, former head of Imperial College London, once head of Defence Procurement in the UK, a lively chairman of Shell Oil, this snowy-haired, bushy-browed geologist, with his lilting, almost-Welsh accent, is as close to being the best authority on energy anywhere. At our last meeting in Sydney, at the end of 2006, he was as outspoken as ever about climate change:

The evidence that emissions from fossil fuels are modifying the Earth’s climate is overwhelming. Unless we act fast to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there will be damaging and irreversible environmental change; and Australia looks like being very vulnerable. There will be costs, but doing nothing is even more expensive in the long run.

He was proved right almost immediately, when it was announced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology early in 2007 that we are already suffering more than almost any other nation from the effects of climate change.

So what does Ron recommend? In terms of transport-linked sources, there are quite a few possibilities, but it is their adjuncts that will make the difference. He says that the intermittent-flow energy technologies-such as wind, solar and tidal power-will be transformed by redox flow batteries, which can store unlimited amounts of juice and make it available instantly. These energy cells, also known as vanadium redox batteries and patented by UNSW in 1986, are being harnessed to store wind power by the Irish, who expect to get half of their base-load electricity from this source in the near future.

Then there’s the jatropha tree. It grows in arid zones and in Australia is regarded as a weed. Its nut yields an oil that can be produced for about $US3.60 a gallon (about 60 cents more than ordinary diesel). The residue can be used to feed cattle, says Ron, and he has put some of his own money into schemes now flourishing in Mali, Tanzania, India, Thailand and South Africa. The key to success will be quality control in refining.

Lord Oxburgh, like Tim Jones, is keen on oil from corpses. Here is how Brad Lernley of Cosmos magazine reported this story:

It is the worst stuff in the world. Eighteen tonnes of turkey offal-rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines and lungs swollen with putrid gases-slides down a dump truck into a 24-metre-long hopper with a sickening glorp. The smell is worse than the sight: an assertive mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct faecal note.

But two hours later, sterile as you please, an oil truck pulls up behind this Thermal Conversion Process plant in the small American Midwest town of Carthage, Missouri, and the driver attaches a hose from a nearby stationary tank to the truck’s intake valve. One hundred and fifty barrels of oil (23,800 L), worth $US12,300, gushes into the truck’s tank, and off it goes to an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oil to upgrade the stock.

The real challenge, though, it seems to me, will be social. Stunning new machines exist for us to use as trains, planes or road vehicles, but in the main, we misuse them. Concorde has gone, super trains are exotic wonders, and Arnie’s Tesla car could legally use only one-tenth of its capacity on Australia ’s roads.

Imagine, instead, a transport system in which the approach of your bus would be signalled with a ping on your mobile phone and you could stroll to the bus stop knowing the wait would be barely a minute (this technology is ready). Imagine forsaking your car (converting the garage into a romper room or workshop) and having a vehicle-a carlet-only when you really needed it. As private cars already cost more than the taxi equivalent of trips taken, you would also save heaps. Imagine taking trains from the centre of town and moving at 300-350 kph to your destination, getting off just a five-minute walk from where you want to be. Imagine making a plane trip special again, instead of a long-distance endurance test.

Imagine biking or walking (running) to where you want to be, without playing dodgems with killer traffic. And imagine converting your rushed attendance at the gym into a health-giving routine, in which your legs don’t engage with a treadmill going nowhere but take you where you want to be. Imagine that your exercise in exasperation, in going shopping at the supermarket beyond the ring road with three apoplectic kids, is turned into an Internet search for bargains followed by delivery right to your door by an electric go-cart. Imagine travelling only when you really want to. All the time with a smug grin on your face from your appreciation that you’re not wrecking the neighbourhood.

And that future could be ours. Not in 2027, or 2037- but tomorrow!

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Cost of petrol rises from a low point of $0.85 to a high of $2.35 in Australia. Some 56 per cent of people say they would rather die than not drive their cars. Some do.

2009 Singapore and London announce electronic pricing for all roads.

2010 Traffic jams in Beijing and Thailand last four days. Twenty-seven babies born in cars.

2011 Proportion of Sydney residents commuting by car goes up from 72 per cent to 79 per cent. Pedestrian arrested in Canberra.

2012 Petrol reaches $3.20 a litre. Twenty-four per cent of Saudi Arabians are billionaires.

2013 In Sydney and Melbourne 347 car drivers die of starvation.

2014 Japanese launch railway network with bullet trains travelling at 670 kph.

2015 Richard Branson offers trips to the moon for $3.5 million. The first to go find a Starbucks in the Sea of Tranquillity.

2016 Perth removes all cars from within city boundaries. Citizens discover legs.

2017 In Beijing pollution causes fall in life expectancy to 29 years.

2018 Oil Wars break out. Sydney executives no longer allowed free car as part of salary package. Most break down and cry.

2019 Texans accept declared state of emergency and pledge to limit each family to only three 4WDs.

2020 Australian PM rides bike to work. Gets there twenty minutes early.

2024 Government finally removes tax concessions on 4WD purchases.