SLOW TRAVEL

It was announced recently that the completion of Crossrail will be delayed by up to a year. The recent increases in budget leading up to this announcement brings in to focus the challenges around the delivery of HS2. Through this project the UK plans to spend some £17bn on reducing the travel time by train London to Birmingham by around 25 minutes. Whilst this is not an insignificant reduction in time, and improved connection between the South East and the rest of the UK is vital, we do need to ask whether bringing our rail network up to a minimum standard compared to the rest of Europe is going to be enough.

In many ways, the UK suffers from once being the pioneer in railway construction and on the leading edge of the technology from the Victorian era through to the early 1900s. Once the envy of the world, operators now try to squeeze every ounce of performance out of an outdated network with the rest of Western Europe long ago having adopted high speed rail. Having led the field, the country is now playing catch up.

Society is on the cusp of a new technological revolution involving artificial intelligence and automation. The automotive industry is becoming one of the most visible leaders in this technology. That the UK is supporting the research and eventual deployment of ‘platooning’ for goods vehicles is a good start - but do we need to be more ambitious if we are to avoid our infrastructure systems still falling well behind our needs?

The UK has an extensive road network and we are accustomed to enjoying a level of flexibility that arises from the use of private cars. However, the network is at capacity meaning that congestion is limiting our flexibility and the level of car accidents per year evidences humans are far from flawless drivers. Autonomous cars will be able to move faster and closer to each other than is safe for human operators with less skill than Lewis Hamilton to achieve. They will communicate with each other to minimise congestion. They will start to change the way we think about travelling.

Air resistance is the enemy of travelling across land. This is proportional to the area of the front of a vehicle (its “frontal area”) and proportional to the cube of its speed. This illustrates why a train is a more efficient way to travel than a single car – because it has a much lower frontal area per the number of passengers it carries.

Autonomous cars travelling close together will allow vehicles to slip stream each other, much like the riders in the peloton of a bicycle race. This will have a significant reduction in the energy consumption of those vehicles that are not on the front of a pack. Each vehicle will then communicate with each other, calculating the energy each has available to optimise speed and according to the distance of each person’s intended journey. For example, vehicles travelling shorter distances may spend longer breaking through the air at the front to increase the range of those vehicles travelling further. I will provide some outline calculations for this in a separate blog.

This means that we should move away from a model where the energy in your engines tank or battery is used solely for your own journey, but is instead shared amongst everyone in a peloton. With this communal system of travel – where cars work as a team – energy expenditure will be reduced, and efficiency increased. It is likely that this approach would require a central regulator, as we see in other utility industries, to oversee the companies providing travel as a service and ensuring charges are distributed fairly.

Such a regulator could also set out requirements for car manufacturers to optimise the design of vehicles to improve aerodynamics when slip-streaming, as well as the common communication protocols which would be needed to ensure safety and efficiency

Reducing speed is the other major factor here. Travelling slower quite simply saves energy. Do we need to reduce the travel time to Edinburgh? If it takes four hours to travel from London by high speed train you still have a very early start for a morning meeting in Scotland. Or, we use autonomous vehicles as self-driving hotel rooms that pick you up from your home; these travelling units would transport you through the night and allow you to arrive fresh the next day, having used far less energy in the process, by travelling slowly. A US start-up company called cabin has secured funding for its coaches, which are effectively moving hotels. In time these will be automated, starting a revolution in the way we travel.

Autonomous cars will connect our built environment in ways we’ve not yet understood. We need to get ready for the change. Their wide-spread use will affect the design of our buildings, infrastructure hubs and the operation of the energy network. Government needs to work with car manufacturers to understand the future implications of these technologies and put in place infrastructure to facilitate these fast approaching changes in transportation.

As a relatively small but densely populated island, the UK is in a unique position to embrace this opportunity and develop exportable technology and improve the way we travel.

 

Notes:

Transport, DesignDan Cash