Tube Transit

Capsulated Tube Transit
(Chapter for "Open World" book in progress)

By John Taylor; 9 October, 2005

Buckminster Fuller proposed eliminating the need for most roads by the
use of "ducted-fan air cars that can go on roads or rise vertically on
jets of air." This, he said, would extend the reach of personal
transportation to just about anywhere. For other transportation needs
he put forward a unique integration of personal transport with mass
transit.

"...we need to develop personal, modular transportation pods which
could go on roads, be hooked together in groups, be loaded onto
trucks, trains and boats, or put into airplanes for transport
anywhere, with the whole global system scheduled by computer."

I think that this latter proposal rather than personal flying machines
will be remembered by future historians as Fuller's great contribution
to transportation theory. His comprehensive, personalized transit
system followed upon the dream of integrated tube transit of 19th
Century science fiction writers like Jules Verne and Edward Bellamy.
These visionaries imagined the ultimate in mass transit, hidden
encapsulated, pneumatic tubes built into streets and buildings,
carrying people directly to their destination by the quickest and most
direct means possible. Fuller pictured a network of "horizontal
elevators," whose capital costs would be built into standing
infrastructure so that, just as for elevators in high rise buildings,
one could even ride gratis, without paying for travel.

This was a good idea that unfortunately was swept away by the stigma
of mass transit, which was found to have many drawbacks. Fuller grew
up in an age of understandable disillusionment with mass transit, a
disillusionment that gave rise to the surprise success of the
automobile. Although mass transit at its best was fast, efficient, and
what we now call environmentally friendly, at its worst it remained
expensive, arduous and not much faster than before. In retrospect, the
automobile was an great improvement, the first completely personal,
privately owned mode of transport. With Henry Ford's perfection of the
assembly line, automobiles became available to rich and poor.

Until that time nothing could compare with the private automobile's
freedom from rigid schedules and the sardine-can conditions of trains
and buses. Even when the traveler did make his connection at the end
of one leg of a journey, often he had to make his way across town to a
rival company's terminal and hope that the next train or ship would
not be long in coming. Long delays and misadventure seemed inevitable
to travel in an age of disconnected rail, sail and steam lines.

Roads and automobiles afforded, at least for shorter journeys, what in
our present-day Internet jargon is being called "on-demand"
flexibility. A motorist who needed to drive to the general store to
pick up an extra bottle of milk no longer had to consult a bus or
train schedule, he just hopped in the car and went. In contrast to the
alternatives available to the average traveler of the age, this
"on-demand" form of travel gave an indelible impression of
never-before-imagined freedom and independence from what even then was
contemptuously called "the system."

Of course, on demand travel was a characteristic of the car's
predecessor the horse and carriage, though horses were more expensive,
slower and impractical except over short distances. Still, the
motorist who feels such freedom in driving at any time to the corner
store to pick up a bottle of milk forgets that earlier generations had
fresh bottles of milk delivered right to the door every morning. The
elite of centuries before delegated purchases to a retinue of personal
servants and maids. Most work places were close to or completely
integrated with residential districts in order to avoid unnecessary
travel. Most travel today is unnecessary and could be avoided by
proper planning, efficient services and an infrastructure that would
permit low cost, on-demand delivery of small packages.

A forgotten advantage of the horse came in wintertime. In the 19th
Century terrific snowstorms barely rated a mention in Toronto
newspapers, since deep snow actually improved the transportation
system by enabling horses to switch over from wheeled carriages
bouncing over poor roads to pulling sleighs on a perfectly smooth
surface. Now of course, automobile traffic is badly snarled by snow
and bad weather and billions of dollars are wasted every year in
Northern regions plowing every road after each snow flurry.

Buckminster Fuller suggested the best of both worlds, a combination of
the efficiency of mass transit with the privacy and convenience of
personal transport. Standard passenger compartments would be built in
as component parts of automobiles and driven, as now, on local roads.
For longer trips, the passenger compartment would be separated from
the car and loaded into any combination of trucks, trains, ships or
airplanes. In a winter snowstorm, rather than undergoing the huge
expense of plowing the road system, snowmobiles might pull trains of
linked passenger pods fitted onto runners sliding over the snow. In
urban areas the pods would be integrated with the elevators and
"horizontal elevators" to allow door-to-door travel even to the
tallest skyscraper. Such a "podcast" transit system would integrate
smoothely the public and the private sector, maximizing the efficiency
of mass transit with the the "on-demand" flexibility and convenience
of the personal automobile.

Travel pods or modules might be of several standard sizes, some of one
seat and other containing several at once, like the passenger
compartment of a family minivan or small bus. Travel pods like this
might be privately owned or leased, but all would have standard
fittings to allow being loaded into any train, airplane or other
medium. On any given trip a traveller might enter a car, or buses,
tubes, ships, airplanes or any combination thereof without leaving the
module or being aware of the changeovers. Travelers would punch their
proposed itinerary into a terminal, and computers would consult
schedules, calculate the fastest or cheapest route, and print out the
ticket and debit the travelers' bank accounts. If the system were
integrated with extremely high speed evacuated tubes, every point on
earth would be only a few hours from any other. This means that would
be no need for external facilities outside the pods, such as terminals
or baggage handling facilities, thus eliminating many of the
complications and expenses that present day travel involves.

Considering the primitive state of computer science in the 1960's when
he suggested this combination of personal pods with mass transit by
means of computers, Buckminster Fuller was amazingly prescient. Even
today it is wonderful to imagine, say, a rural passenger near a small
town in New York State leaving for Hong Kong by driving from into the
nearest large city, their automobile's passenger compartment then
being switched over to a compartment on a train, which then would
proceed to a New York airport where the compartment would be
automatically loaded into an airplane, or perhaps an intercontinental
underground, underwater tube. This traveler need only punch in the
destination upon entering the travel "pod," and arrive in Hong Kong
without ever having lifted her eyes from a book during the journey.

Over the last decades of the twentieth century the international
transport system slowly and reluctantly learned to follow the spirit
of Fuller's plan, except that it restricted itself only to packages,
cargo, and non-human transport. The accepted term for this became
"containerization," a strategy that brought about enormous savings as
soon as international cargo handlers bit the bullet and accepted only
standard crates of given sizes, which allowed computerized tracking
early on. Further gains came when this was combined with mixed mode or
inter-modal transport, that is, moving packages freely among trains,
trucks and airplanes. Now large container packages, often in turn
holding many smaller packages inside, travel freely around the world
using the most direct route, regardless of whether the carrier is a
truck, a ship, train or airplane.

Fuller's complete idea, of course, poses a greater challenge -- taking
containerized, inter-modal transport further to include handling
people in standard travel pods as well as cargo in containers.
Needless to say, humans tend to be less tolerant of long delays, of
their containers being accidentally dropped or crushed, or ending up
at the wrong destination. In the case of evacuated and pneumatic
tubes, which would often run underground --pneumatic tube travel,
propulsion by pumps and air pressure, has long been known to be the
most efficient form of transport for trips of less than 400 kilometers
-- the prospect of being stuck helplessly underground in the event of
a system failure is frightening even for those not prone to
claustrophobia.

Daunting as the initial technical obstacles to such reform may seem at
first, it is the moral and legal barriers that have been the show
stoppers. In the Twentieth Century, especially its last decades, even
simple and minor adjustments to the transportation system were
consistently ignored and neglected by policy makers. It takes very
little investment to accommodate bicycle racks on trains and buses,
but even this basic inter-modal transport was rarely permitted, in
spite of the fact that a bicycle on hand would vastly extend every
traveler's local range of operation on reaching their destination.

Behind this imbalance is a general feeling that money is better spent
on communications than travel and housing infrastructure, no doubt
because the former is of more immediate value for the military. While
the communications industry has been subject to thirty years of
judicious deregulation, transportation red tape remains sacrosanct.
Anyone who dares compete with unionized bus or train routes, or start
up a new commuter service to an un-serviced town, or initiate a
cheroot operation of shared taxis, or even pool rides on small trucks
and buses, risks a jail term. Opening up competition in the
communications industry has stimulated innovation and lowered costs
for everybody while lack of competition in transportation is literally
choking our planet to death.

Computer networking is now exponentially faster; integrated ticket
handling from departure to destination has become routine. It is no
longer such an adventure to make your way around the world, though
unfortunately delays caused by the factors mentioned above still keep
the word "travel" close to its root, "travail," extremely laborious,
arduous work. Every day former advantages of personal transit by
automobile are reversing themselves into liabilities. Entire cities
and suburban neighborhoods are designed around complete dependence
upon the automobile; roads are clogged with traffic, air is smoggy and
rates of obesity and heart disease continue to skyrocket with no end
in sight.

Improvements in networking have taken cargo handling far beyond its
early baby steps of containerization and inter-modal transport. The
recent development of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices
allows cheap cameras and sensors to be implanted anywhere, from city
stock yards to orchards to the depths of the rain forest. This real
time tracking is being called "ubiquitous computing." Transport,
delivery and cargo companies and their clients keep close track every
item being shipped. Exactly where a package or item of clothing on the
way to and from retail outlets is mapped out for customers in real
time on the Internet. Dispatchers can see whether a load of gravel in
a dump truck on the road is full or running at less than full
capacity. Controversially, Wal-Mart track inventory before it enters
stores as well as after has been purchased. Farmers detect how much
fertilizer is required by every stalk of wheat in a field, or how many
worms are attacking each apple in an orchard.

Every day the gap between transportation and communications widens. In
spite of the Internet and computerized handling everywhere,
increasingly travelers suffer delays and motorists sit in incessant
gridlock. Computer networking and sensor technology, having both legal
and financial support, make huge, disproportionate leaps forward while
human transport languishes and our atmosphere is filled with a
chemical soup of pollutants.

For such reasons I do not think that in the long term capsulated tube
transit will stay forgotten for long. Evidence is mounting that bad as
automobiles are for the environment, rockets and jet airplanes are
worse. Startlingly high levels of rocket fuel are showing up in
mother's milk and evidence is collecting that the contrails of jet
airplanes are a significant factor in accelerating the greenhouse
effect. Worse, pollution from a jet engine is floating closer to the
ozone layer and it stands to reason that it will do proportionately
more damage than air pollution originating on the ground.

If it turns out that journeys to space and intercontinental air travel
are endangering the long term habitability of our planet, the only
alternative to eliminating space travel completely would be the
so-called "space elevator." This would use electric elevators running
up and down a long tether into low earth orbit, held taught by a
pendulum effect, thus eliminating any need for rockets. For
intercontinental jet travel, long evacuated tubes running under
mountains and under the surface of the ocean would have to be adopted,
whatever the expense. Using either traditional electric locomotives or
Japan's newly perfected magnetic levitation technology, trains could
run at ten thousand kilometers an hour, or more, in such the
frictionless medium of a vacuum.

Fortunately, the extremely strong materials that such transportation
mega-projects would demand have been invented and are entering mass
production as I write. Appropriately named "woven Bucky-tubes," after
Buckminster Fuller's best known invention, the Geodesic Dome resembles
closely the naturally found carbon Buckyballs found under microscopes
in the 1980's. The discovery of Buckyballs inspired in turn
construction of artificial Buckytubes and, now, woven, factory
produced Buckytubes.

At the same time, the latest General Motors' concept cars for hydrogen
vehicles are in important respects eerily similar to the automobiles
accepting passenger pods advocated by Buckminster Fuller. Because a
hydrogen motor and fuel assembly can be built into a flat,
half-meter-thick chassis and wheel assembly, GM designed passenger
compartments over which are fitted several alternative, customized
body styles. Thus a car might be a minivan one day with one body cover
fitted over it, and on other days it would be an SUV or a pickup
truck. Needless to say, there is no mention of standard sizes or
inter-modal travel, or of passenger compartments that would be built
independently of the rest of the vehicle and be easily detachable.
Needless to say, a future designed by an automobile company will keep
the money-making potential of large manufacturers before the overall
transportation needs of the human totality.

The genius of Buckminster Fuller was his insight that transport is
analogous to evolution's first and most fundamental step to biological
complexity, the leap from unicellular to multi-cellular life. No
matter how complex the form an organism evolves into, nature has
discovered nothing more efficient than tube transport. Seen from above
a modern city with its arteries choked by automobiles resembles a vast
amoeba, paramecium, or other primitive unicellular organism found in
dirty swamp water. A tube transit system would take human
infrastructure to the next level of complexity, that of multi-cellular
organisms that judiciously hide all "transport" mechanisms inside.
Veins and arteries carry in the liquid medium of blood or protoplasm
many semi-independent "capsules" of chemicals, oxygen, antibodies, and
so forth, all hidden away, running secure and direct among internal
organs, limbs and other specialized structures.

The difference between a cell that interacts with its surroundings
independently and one that does so as a part of a greater organic
whole may seem minor at a superficial glance but from a genetic point
of view the differences are huge. Similarly, if human organization is
to take us from two dimensions to tube transit's third dimension, more
than technology will need to change the preconditions in our thinking,
our ways of owning things and interacting with other human beings;
that means living under new laws with more integral moral values.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com