THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION

Two points emerge from a deeper look at transportation. As the distance of travel increases from a few yards to a few thousand miles, the appropriate transportation changes from walking to automobiles to trains and planes. But there is a gap between walking and the automobile, spanning the range of roughly 400 yards to 2 miles. There is the horse and the bicycle, of course, but neither is usable by everybody everywhere; not, for example, for getting from the airport to the parking lot.

A second point is that it is not the engineers' inventions that determine the development of transportation. (Nor is the rest of history made by scientists or philosophers, let alone politicians.) Engineers could have invented new modes of transportation long ago, and they did: the supersonic airliner, for example. The reason why it failed in the US was not that Nixon could not get it through Congress, nor is the Concord being phased out because the technophobes became hysterical; but at the present level of demand the conventional jet is still too profitable to be replaced.

But the present has a habit of turning into the past, and the two can guide us into the future. In one of his brilliant essays,(*) Prof. Cesare Marchetti of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) finds that the number of airliners in operation has remained remarkably constant in tune at about 3,500; the vastly increased demand was met with larger and faster planes. (Something similar is true of oil tankers.) Using well known income and energy distributions, he finds that air transport is bound to absorb a rapidly increasing fraction of the energy budget; and applying one of his historical curves that you just can't argue with [AtE Apr 78, Sep 80], he finds that by the end of the century new planes with about 10 times the productivity of a Boeing 747 will have to be phased in.

Call it 3 times larger and 3 times faster, and you are talking about an unthinkable 1,000 tons of contemporary fuel at takeoff, and that is just one pointer to liquid hydrogen as the fuel of the future. Hydrogen is now obtained from natural gas; but with enough energy, it can be extracted from water.

"The source of this hydrogen is really immaterial at the start," says Marchetti. But in the long term, "nuclear is the best bet, and I can well see each airport associated with a proper nuclear reactor, the cost of the liquid hydrogen being then substantially stable over the life of the plant."

As for IIASA, (in Laxenburg, Austria), there is a sad postscript. The US has served notice that due to budgetary constraints it intends to withdraw from it at the end of 1982. (The US and the USSR each fund 28% of its $10 million budget). This is sad, for IIASA is not just another international holiday resort for profs on sabbaticals, nor do its computers crunch garbage dreamt up by social engineers. For energy analysis, it is probably the world's leading institution.

Once again, we will not wail when government expenditures are cut. But we do have answers to President Reagan's well known questions.

If not IIASA, who?

UNESCO, and the rest of the United Twerps and Butchers.

If not now, when? -- At midnight, 31 December 1981.

* "The evolution of the energy system and the aircraft industry," Chemical Econ. & Energy Rev., May 1980.