What the future holds for our transport and our pockets
By Dulce Carrillo. May 31, 2017.
Transportation
has been part of our lives as humans ever since the start of our time on
earth’s surface and its development has marked several turning points that have
changed the course of history. If we might recall, at the begging there was
nothing but our feet and we could only go as far as their strength could take
us, it took approximately 8,000 years for the early nomads to go from North
America to South America. Later on, the first manmade transportation methods
started to appear- rafts, canoes, boats-, after the Mesopotamians invented the
wheel we got carriages and chariots, and we learned to tame and ride animals,
all this allowing us to go even further in a shorter period of time. With the
first industrial revolution came the steam train and with the second industrial
revolution came the airplane, the car and a million other options for us to
move around, all this allowing an almost limitless communication between all
the countries in the world. But it does not stop there, the future is rapidly
getting near and there are changes in the way we transport that are already happening
or about to do so, this will bring a change to the structure of the economy in
the world, although there are still things that could be done to make the
future look even better.
Companies tend to, forgive the redundancy, follow
tendencies, this meaning they all move towards the same direction, and with the
industry of transport it is not any different. There is a clear path showing
where the technologies used to move the population around the globe are changing
to. In one side, there has been a clear increase in the ecological awareness in
our society -according to Gallup poll’s results from 2014 to 2017 the
percentage of Americans worried about global warming increased from 32% to 45%-
therefore, one of the designers’ and innovators’ main concerns is how to
transport people doing the less damage possible to our already damaged
environment. The most popular answer has been Electric Vehicles. This is not
new technology, the first functional one was designed as early as the second
half of the XIX century when William Morrison introduced his electric vehicle
capable of going to a speed of up to 14 miles per hour. Back then it had a good
response from the public, however it all died down soon with the arrival of the
mass production of gas-powered vehicles. For almost all the XX century the
development of electric cars was forgotten, but with the rise of gas prices and
of environmental awareness, engineers have resumed their search of the best
electric vehicles designs. Today there are almost 60 models available in the
market, representing 3% of the total car sales, but with the constant efforts
of improving their performance and lowering their prices, experts believe that
by the year 2050 only 10% of the produced cars will be powered solely by fossil
fuels.
In other side, we have a number of companies, both big
renowned ones -like Google, Mercedes Benz, Uber, and Tesla- and smaller ones –such
as Local Motors-, betting on cars with self-driving technology. We have gone as
far as having in the market several cars with auto parking features and all the
mentioned companies are already testing prototypes, however there are many
obstacles that are still to be sorted out for example the fact that government
regulations are not adapted for this kind of technology, but with the efforts
made by all the people involved in their development, it should not be long
before self-driving vehicles get here and establish themselves as competitive
options in the transportation market. They could lead us to a big leap in the update
of our cities’ infrastructure along with other many benefits.
We
live in the era of the internet and the connectivity, kids now a days are born
with a smartphone in their hands, it is getting more common to find public
spaces with internet connection, and the transport industry is finding ways to
be part of this movement. In a few years there will be thousands of apps
reporting live transit, everyone will be able to check at any time if their bus
is coming, what is the best route to get to their work, how to move in the public
transport in a new city or any piece of information regarding transportation.
Today, there are cities such as New York with strategically located interactive
kiosks were you can get this information, however, it is just a matter of time
before we find ourselves connected. This will also give more space for
car-sharing services to grow, you have Uber and Cabify, establishing in more
cities around the world, and BlaBlaCar and Liftshare growing in popularity, the
first already with 40 million members around the world. People are realizing
the benefits this kind of services have for their personal economy and for the
environment and this will not change in the next 10 years. Having all this will
be possible through sensors, which will also become more popular due to all the
applications they can be useful for. Autonomous cars will use them to avoid
accidents, they will be used to keep track of the amount of cars in a street to
make traffic signs more efficient, they will be used to sense when people is
around streetlights and when there is no one so that in the latter case the
light is dimmer, among many other uses sensors could have. They are the one
thing that cities need to become smart and more than anything efficient, this
fact will make the demand for them and rise, which will make prices decrease,
all this leading to the belief that in 10 years there will be millions of
sensors in all cities around the world.
No change
comes without a consequence and in today’s world most consequences hit the
economic sector. Yes, we will have autonomous and electric vehicles, but this
will mean the economy in the world will see changes in its structure, both
positive and negative. As mentioned before, protecting the environment is a
priority for many inventors this days and with their achievements, not only do
we find ecological benefits, but also economical. Governments spend enormous quantities
of money trying to put a Band-Aid in the environment. For example, in Mexico
City, one of the most overcrowded and polluted cities in the world, there is a
program called “Hoy no Circula” that is set to be used in case of environmental
contingency and consists of forbidding cars to ride around the city for 3 days
a week, aiming to decrease the number of cars polluting the environment. A good
idea, in theory, however, after almost 2 months since it was set, it has
represented a loss of over 300 million USD for the government and the city’s
habitants and small business. With electrical cars, the environmental damage
decreases, therefore governments have to spend less money in cleaning the
cities.
Autonomous
vehicles will have mainly positive impact. The average American spends 100 hours
every year sitting in traffic, self-driving cars allow you to make that time
more efficient. Instead of driving you could use that time to do a variety of
other more productive things. You could work and with that, help increase the
profits of the company you work for, or in that case, your company. The driver
could strengthen his or her relationship with the rest of the world, maybe you
finished earlier your work because you were able to work instead of driving and
got home earlier or maybe instead of driving you were chatting with a friend, strengthening
the bond. And this is relevant because relationships represent consumption, you
will spend either in going out or in buying gifts or just in keeping in touch. In
general, self-driving vehicles will bring more consumption -you will have more
time to buy online, watch movies, or use your social media- which will benefit
the companies selling those products, higher demand will need higher offer,
which will create jobs, having as a consequence the strengthening of economies.
Still on the topic of higher consumption, people with the economical capacity
to spend, just to put an example, on a 400 non self-driving car would maybe
choose to instead buy a 450 autonomous car, which will give them more free time
to do other things that may leave them more benefits.
One
of the factors that makes actual vehicles inefficient is that drivers do not
always know how to make the most out of their cars, they have driving habits
that can hinder their ride’s performance. Self-driving cars will be programmed
in the way that engineers know will be the best so that no feature is wasted. This
will also decrease the number of car accidents to an expected 95% less, which
will mean more than a million lives saved every year. Positive for the
customer, who will spend less in repairing the aftermath of an accident, car
damages, hospitals, etc. Negative, for example, for car insurance companies, which
will see a decrease in the work available for them.
The oil
industry will also be affected by the popularization of this new technologies,
especially electric vehicles. There are whole countries that support their
economy with the profits this industry leave, such is the case, for example, of
Saudi Arabia, one of the top oil exporter country in the world. However, this
is a fast moving world, companies (and countries) have to be able to evolve or
die. There have been so many which were not able to move towards what the
future was dictating and broke trying to stay the same, you have the example of
Blockbuster, who did not move to the now very popular streaming service and
fell to Netflix's feet, or the case of Kodak who stuck to its digital camera
business and was defeated by Apple, Samsung and all other companies that
migrated from cameras to smart phones capable of doing the same job and even
better.
The
future is not written yet and tendencies could change any minute if the right
ideas come to replace them, I cannot say I have the solutions for all our
problems, but there are things that could be done to make the future look even
better. It should not be enough with just making better cars, because that
still means pollution, still produces trash, noise and visual contamination. Why
not getting rid of all private transport and replace it only with public
transport? Personally, I do not use the latter because it is overcrowded,
unsafe, uncomfortable, and it takes too long to get me to my destination, but
if it did not have all those inconveniences, I would use it because that is the
best way of protecting my environment. Maybe not everyone thinks the same,
maybe they would not use public transport even if it was as comfortable as private
cars, but the best way to find out whether they would or not is making public transportation
competitive with private in every aspect. We should create a social awareness
of protecting the environment, if all transport has the same benefits then the
only reason you could have to prefer private would be vanity, but vanity will
not lead us anywhere as a society.
The poorest
countries can find benefit in this technological leaps, as Jeremy Rifkin
suggests. Instead of investing in catching up to what we have in the actuality,
they could use that money to create the infrastructure necessary to have for
example autonomous public transport. That is one of the biggest obstacles that
have to be sorted out, getting rid of today’s technology to replace it for new
one, but if you have nothing then you need to get rid of nothing, you can start
from zero, which will require less investment than the other option. As a
consequence, their economy could improve, getting them out of the “poor country”
status. We could eliminate the huge gap between developed and developing
countries and help improve everyone’s quality of life.
Transportation has always been and will always be
essential in our lives, we have the necessity to move, especially now that
globalization has connected the whole world. The future will be bring changes
to it, which will change everything economically, but we need to find what the
best decisions to make are. Change is unavoidable, we cannot stop time and no
matter what we do the future will bring changes in the technology we use for
transportation, so it is in our hands to make sure we are able to make of it
another turning point in the history of humanity.
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