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Raghu Dayal

Tomorrow's Transportation Changing Cities, Economies and Lives By William L. Garrison and Jerry D. Ward Publishers: Artech House, London Price: Not mentioned

As a handmaid of development, transportation has been a crucial factor: In the Preface itself, it has been claimed that, "The book is about change, some of the opportunities in our future, especially the ones that could really happen."

Globalisation — the growing economic integration of nations around the world — is the most obvious of the trends identified with the communication revolution. In the last half of the 19th century, the railroad, the telegraph, and, less dramatically, the steamship began loosening the ancient transportation constraints. By 1900, the telephone was beginning to reshape personal habit patterns and institutional organisation. The first successful airlines appeared in the 1930s, TV in the 1950s, and in the 1960s man walked on the moon. The 1970s produced the first personal computer.

Emphasising that `better personal transportation has widened the scope of social, commercial and institutional interaction', the second chapter refers to `the first giant step toward automation', the addition of a battery and self-starter in the automobile in 1919. Manual spark and choke controls disappeared; the automatic transmission further encouraged the expansion of the driving populace; and the computer chip has already started its near-revolution in the continuing automation of vehicle functions. With a striking caption — The Car that can Drive Itself — attention is drawn to various sensors added to the car, to see the traffic ahead.

While Chapter 4 summarises what's being done to alleviate congestion — `The Devil We Know'— most of these steps are part of the intelligent transportation system programme. The book thus turns to the future and focuses in the next five chapters on the dominant mode of personal transportation: the car, also addressing the almost ubiquitous problem of traffic congestion. The last chapter of the section discusses the possibility of new kinds of automobiles.

The next section of the book is devoted to cities and how they might change in the future with the advent of new kinds of transportation to serve them. Transportation enabled the long transition from a world of city-states to a world of nations. For thousands of years, there were no real fundamental changes in the spatial arrangement of cities because there were no fundamental changes in the transportation technologies that would permit or enable those changes. Little changed the basic demand for proximity until well into the 19th century. Talking of the birth of the modem city, the authors explain that the precursor step in the larger cities was the horse-drawn streetcar; followed by a few steam-powered cable cars, and, thereafter, by electric trolley. Then came the automobile. In the 1920s, the United States went from one car for about every 35 people to one car for every five. The city reshaped itself into a largely low density metropolitan area: an old dense core surrounded by low-density development. It is concluded that the optimum low-density suburb mode of transport from the viewpoint of both the cost and convenience is the automobile.

Realising that discussion of transportation must include energy and environmental considerations, the authors root for new autos, which are claimed very clean compared to old ones. The emissions of the fleet of new vehicles has gained dramatically in comparison to other sources of pollutants. The energy required to push vehicles through the air increases about as the square of the speed. The use of alternative fuels is being promoted: natural gas (mostly methane) is inexpensive and in good supply, so compressed natural gas or natural gas converted to methanol are favoured fuels.

The birth of the railroads did far more than just improve transportation; it was a key development in energising the whole Industrial Revolution. In `The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution', Rick Szostak attributes England's lead in this historic metamorphosis to their central role in inventing and implementing this new technology of rail. The railroads, and later trucking, let the factories move to cheaper land so that the factory could be re-arranged for greater productivity. This transformation of the US economy started by the railroads was accelerated by the motor vehicle. By the mid-1920s, with two decades of the real take-off of the Model-T, roughly two-thirds of American families had a car.

At its peak about 1920, there were over 2,50,000 miles of railway track. By the mid-1990s, Class I rail mileage was down to 1,09,000 miles. In contrast, there are some 1,74,000 miles of federal interest highways, where most of the heavy trucks operate. There are another 6,90,000 miles of state highways and 2,200,000 miles of so-called rural roads. For the authors, the apparent inexorable push for personal services complicates imagining the future. From technological opportunities to generate cheaper, faster, better services for users, the book has hypothesised some development paths to the future.

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