Buscar: 

Towards a more sustainable transport

Under the title THE COMPUTERIZATION OF TRANSPORT. FORECAST AND PROPOSAL FOR 2050, a recent work by the writer Julio Arbesú maintains that the main foreseeable trends as far as land transport is concerned are positive for the environment. The scenario that he offers us for 2050 is the following one:

    
- Mass public transport will guarantee the complete trip from the door of origin to the door of destination using vehicles of no more than 15-seats. The instruments the transport network will use to obtain this are: the previous agreement of all trips, both short and long ones, by telephone or the Internet; the combination of vehicle supply and journey demand data by means of computer programs; driving (human as much as automatic) based on the routes established by the programs to pick up and drop off passengers at their door of origin and destination. To this we can add the success of the contracts with which the travel agencies will guarantee their users a complete service for all trips thanks to the combination of data and means of transport.

 
- Many private vehicles will continue to exist, but the public complete-service vehicles will be able to attract a lot of private vehicle owners on a high percentage of their trips.
- Vehicles with more than 15 seats will be obsolete, since the challenge of 21st century public transport is the door-to-door trip, not the 20th century trip from one station to another.

 

 

- The extinction of large passenger vehicles will allow us to reach the definitive solution to part speed from human and animal activity: light elevation. All fast routes will be built on columns forming a light continuous bridge.

 
- Freight, in its immense majority, will move separated by narrow conduits (there will even be super-narrow home delivery ones), generally buried at little depth.
- The separation of speed by light elevation and of freight by conduits will open the way for the widespread electrification of engines, because in both circumstances they will have an energy network at their disposition, like electric trains.
- The last two factors will offer the conditions for making cities entirely pedestrian. At street level vehicles will circulate at less than 40 km/h, giving preference to pedestrians.

In summary, advances in transport will bring great environmental benefits to the climatic change caused by greenhouse gases. This phenomenon  will occur thanks to the energy saving generated by:
- a greater efficiency in the combination of supply and demand,
- the diminution of private trips,
- the electrification of engines.

Also, elevated light routes will mean a huge saving in the work of land clearing and bridge and tunnel building.

This last advance will involve much less aggressive environmental impacts on fields and mountains.

Urban life will improve by making the ground level fully pedestrian and by means of the electrification of engines which will avoid air pollution in cities.

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