I'm sure you may be wondering why I've started this blog. You might be thinking, "Josh has a 3-month old and he's in a very demanding PhD program, does he really need to be wasting time blogging?" As many of you know I've had a longstanding obsession with transportation. I've decided to start an organization that advocates for radical, new transportation.
New forms of transportation are long overdue. If you compare the transportation we use today to the transportation of fifty years ago there are only insubstantial differences: cars were heavier and less fuel efficient, planes were much more expensive and couldn't fly as far, and there were no bullet trains. However, all of these changes are incremental, not revolutionary. Compare that to the changes in computing, pharmaceuticals, and communications.
The status quo has left the American transportation system in crisis. Traffic in most major metropolitan areas worsens every year. At the same time the bridges, tunnels, and even standard roadways are in disrepair. The congestion in major airports is so bad that the FAA is imposing flight caps. The air traffic control system hasn't been modernized in decades and is stretched well beyond capacity. Global warming has alerted us to the stupidity of burning fossil fuels. We need to do better than even the best hybrid technology to reduce global warming in the face of the fast rising energy needs of emerging nations like China and India. Finally, cars are just too dangerous. They are the leading killer of young people and that won't change just by adding more airbags. These are all huge problems and they need huge solutions.
I think the crisis demands a massive investment by either the federal government or very wealthy philanthropists into transportation research. I believe the advances in material science, mechanical engineering, and in particular computer science leave us tantalizingly close to safer, cleaner, and faster transportation systems. However, a tremendous research effort is needed to get us over the hump. I hope you don't think I'm talking about science fiction in the form of flying cars, "beaming", or warp drive. I'm talking about tangible efforts that have real prototypes, like:
- Autonomous vehicles like Boss (see previous post).
- Personalized public transportation like ULTra being developed for Heathrow airport.
- New Supersonic Jets
- Space Elevators
- Tunneling Machines
I plan to spend this blog linking to and discussing advances in projects like those listed above. I also hope to interview a diverse set of experts: scientists and engineers working on transportation projects, economists, Department of Transportation employees, Environmental Advocates, Airline executives, etc. I'm also going to write opinion pieces, that will serve as drafts of letters and op/eds that I will send to newspapers, magazines or academic journals. Finally, I would like to discuss organizational, publicity and fundraising ideas.
The comments will be off for the vast majority of posts because I don't have the time to sift through spam. Occasionally, I will open up a topic for discussion and I STRONGLY you encourage you to stay on topic. I plan to moderate all comments, so personal attacks and the like will NOT appear. If you write obnoxious posts you won't be proving how smart you are or how dumb the other guy is, you'll just be wasting my time.
Thanks for reading!
Links: Tunnel Boring Machines | Space Elevator | Supersonic Jets | ULTra | Boss
