In the Wired article, Hapgood suggests that we'll see quite a lot of our present construction dive underground: roads, parking lots, downtown hotels, warehouses, even residential artists' lofts. But before any of that could happen we need to realize that transportation would have to be built first in the above set of possibilities. Otherwise, zoning laws will very effectively shut down new construction in any instance where it might further load our already stressed transportation infrastructure in major urban cities like Los Angeles, a living space that stays self-organized at the edge of chaos.

In other words, transportation is the bottleneck to building in the third dimension, and reaching the kinds of STEM efficiencies Hapgood envisions will happen or not based on our ability to build the network described here.

Let's see what we are up against.

2. Automated Highway (AH) Systems. Some time post 2020, possibly as late as 2040-2050 in a more pessimistic analysis, we shall begin to see special, above-ground lanes with markings that allow our increasingly intelligent cars to self-pilot over long distances. The first automated highway networks will be built when our car's onboard computer, sensor, and actuator systems can solve the "2D" problem of autorouting moving vehicles within special pre-mapped (and realtime updated) virtual spaces. It is reasonable to expect that this problem will be solved many years, perhaps even decades before we have the ability to create autonomous, agent-based air traffic control systems in 3D space for tomorrows airplanes, as this latter is a significantly more difficult computational problem. Furthermore, the vastly increased numbers of humans traveling on (and dying on) today's roads vs. in today's skies makes the former a much higher social engineering priority.

At first, there will only be a few of these special AH lanes, probably taking over the inner HOV lanes on our freeways (first for intercontinental trucking) and later, larger boulevards. For at least the first decade or two, we should also expect that humans will be required to remain behind the wheel, at least theoretically being able to take over this "cruise control" at a moment's notice.

These systems will certainly be built out slowly due to very high initial coast, beginning some time after 2020, between and within our more sprawling and high-density metropoli, like Los Angeles and New York, and at significant road real estate expense. These smart small trucks and vehicles will be carefully-watched curiosities for several years, and automatic collision-avoidance systems will be the interim technology, likely appearing in every new car before we see the first full scale automated vehicle (AV) models (Toyota? GM? Xeon? We wait with anticipation...). When hooked into an AV/AH system, 21st century multitaskers can simply do a lot more living than they can when their hands, feet, and eyes are constantly chained to the road. Being allowed to view video (or the interactive internet of 2030) while driving in an AV may be a killer app for productivity and free time, one that by definition causes many of us to purchase such systems.

The future of an idealized transportation network would include fully automated routing to our destination, allowing us great nap, entertainment, or private time in the increasingly comfortable mobile offices and entertainment spaces that we've been busily building toward since the birth of the automobile. Our early luxury furnishings gave rise to station wagons, minivans, and SUVs.

All roads lead us toward the increasingly magical "swiss-army cars" of tomorrow, able to increasingly dynamically reconfigure themselves to fit the changing needs of the occupant.

Chuck Thorpe's
Navlab

"Smart Road,
Smart Car"

3. Fuel Cell, Electric, and Zero Emission Fossil Fuel (ZEFF)Vehicles. Sometime circa 2030, by many accounts, we'll see the first mass-market affordable fuel cell vehicles. GM's Autonomy frame, perhaps the most provocative design to date, is pictured to the right. As today's high school students will tell you, these beauties produce only water in their exhaust and are really cool.

At the same time, we'll see more electrics, more clean burning natural gas vehicles, and the takeover of the gas burning market by hybrids, which are today almost as efficient as idealized hydrogen cars but without all the problems of conversion, as Dominic Cera notes.

Ford's ZEV

One of the hidden benefits of eventually putting most of our automotive transport underground is that AH "riders" don't care that there's no scenery. They won't looking around at their surroundings, so they don't need to be above ground. As soon as the cruise control is engaged, if legal, they will retreat to the cozy environs of their cars, buses, and mini-trains, getting on with the business of their lives.

Those Cisco routers under their hoods will handle the merges and interchanges, while serving up the latest information feeds to the passenger compartments. Imagine that: data and physical packets, automatically flowing along on one convergent protocol. Tomorrow's urbanites, if the most fully realized AH networks emerge, will be thus able to "teleport" themselves wherever they want throughout the megacity, with little disruption of the flow of their lives in the process.

Typical AH networks will involve some "fan" of exits to handle the outflow volume, and the more popular underground AH becomes, the more underground parking lots will be built. The strongest surface traffic reduction would emerge when all the city's major above-ground parking structures are directly linked to the tunnel network. Drivers will still have to come back to their seats to drive that pesky "last mile" on the surface by hand. If they don't do that, they will be auto-routed to some expensive city-owned underground storage lot, you can be sure.

Only a very robust A.I. could take over an open-course, surface street driving function, and that eventuality, as we will discuss, changes the nature of the game. But within the first AH network, wherever it emerges, 21st century Jetsons will be zipping along in their vibration-stabilized wombs at seventy to ninety miles per hour, nonstop, nearly as straight as the crow flies. That would make the pleasures and possiblities of the entire New York Metropolitan Area as accessible as the corner store, any time of day.

Want to drive the whole way manually instead? There's always the surface option.

Parking Lot Arboretums and Trailway Takebacks: Growth of Urban Greenbelts

Moving many of our present parking lots and even some of our current multi-level parking structures underground would be another very valuable addition to the AH system. If construction of underground parking became as cheap as underground tunneling, cities would jump to build underground lots for AH-equipped cars. Some residents might choose to store their cars permanently underground at their local lot, paying rent, and freeing up their residential garage space for extra living rooms. Some of these individuals would also loan their stored cars to car "co-ops," sharing multiple individuals per car. Of course some descendant of today's leading rental car companies would offer clever new ideas in this regard as well.

Now we dare consider that if our AH networks can become particularly successful prior to the singularity, much of today's above-ground parking infrastructure, and even some small fraction (10%? Perhaps more?) of our denser city's current roads and highways, are very likely to dive underground as well. Of course, if that occurred, many of today's cities would rezone some of those reclaimed areas as greenbelt, bringing beauty back to some of our most blighted urban environments. I'd certainly love to see a few of our 12-level parking lots disappear, with the ground below them transformed into arboretums. If the economics allowed it, that could be an irresistible image to a 21st century urban voter: the city's less strategic, low-traffic pavement giving way to parkland and new running, biking, and riding trails, while our average urban drive-times substantially decrease simultaneously.

Such foresighted "takeback" (a wonderful eco-term that more of us should be aware of) could occur in a significant manner only after we'd first solved our current rush hour transportation gridlock via a cleverly routed, redundant UAH system. We'll have to do this while accomodating a steadily increasing future city density at the same time, of course. While working through thorny labor issues, and fighting all those famous cost overruns and political logrolls. In other words, there's a whole lot of hard work ahead before an effective and affordable first-generation underground AH network will be realized.

Post 2020, 60% of the world's populace is expected to live in the confines of a city. These magnificent environments are the final destination for human beings prior to the singularity. With robust UAH networks, the transportation times within our great cities could be made better than ever, in a way most residents would find appealing.

This said, I do believe monorails can be beautiful, and will gain increasing acceptance in a growing number of cities as one element in a plurality of transportation options, as they become increasingly quiet, energy efficient, and to some extent at least, aesthetically appealing. Both high speed elevated rail and mag-lev installations are making steady advances, and both now offer peak operating speeds around 250 mph (likely to be the approximate maximum for many years to come, due to high velocity turbulence).

Such systems remain mass rather than personal transit however, removing both travel environment customization and door-to-door convenience. They will likely only be used in a few high density corridors, and unless they are to become a visual blight, are not likely to even double a city’s current traffic capacity, much less improve it by an order of magnitude. Nevertheless, monorails seem particularly attractive as city showpieces, traveling over the most beautiful areas of each city, as extensions for existing mass transit networks, and as adjuncts to high density tourist attractions.

But for the bulk of human urban transport then, instead of monorails, I think we're headed for mole holes, and later, nature trails. If we decide to repurpose some of our surface roads intelligently enough, we may even see some functional trail networks emerge for that increasing fraction of urbanites who would like the option to use human-powered bicycles, electric bikes, and other low-speed electrics, such as Segways, for some of their local transportation.

Cruising through the shrubberies at a computer governed 15-30 mph, getting a workout if one wants, and enjoying the view all the way to our destination. Actively toiling toward a coming era of human-surpassing machine intelligence, but in the meantime making the best, most humanizing use of the present technology and ingenuity at our disposal. Sounds like a sufficiently green future to me.

In Conclusion

The first links of a coming underground automated highway system, likely appearing circa 2030 in our largest cities, appear to me to be statistically highly probable event, even given the rapid growth of digitization, e-commerce, and virtual reality technologies as increasingly effective surrogates for physical transportation in coming years.

Transportation planners, I'd start asking how we might accelerate the arrival of such productivity and quality of life enhancing networks in our largest cities.

And once we have effective UAH in any city, perhaps the greatest dividend, after the increased social computation and convenience, would be a functional new greenbelt built on the skeleton of some of the surface roads we could now afford to repurpose. That latter emergence would require particular foresight on the part of the communities instituting these networks.

We at the Acceleration Studies Foundation hope that we will realize such visions in many of our biggest cities, in a balanced and cost-effective manner, sooner rather than later. Will we see the very first link of a successful underground automated highway project completed in 2030, in 2040, or in 2060? Just as importantly, which country will lead the way? The shape of this future is ours to choose. Safe travels to you!

Feedback? Send us an email at mail(at)accelerating.org.