Transport Revolutions

Moving People and Freight Without Oil

Richard Gilbert, Anthony Pearl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844072484
• eBook ISBN: 9781136550904
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil sets out the challenges to our growing dependence on transport fuelled by low-priced oil. These challenges include an early peak in world oil production and profound climate change resulting in part from oil use. It proposes responses to ensure effective, secure movement of people and goods in ways that make the best use of renewable sources of energy while minimizing environmental impacts.

Transport Revolutions synthesizes engineering, economics, environment, organization, policy and technology, and draws extensively on current data to present important conclusions. The authors argue that land transport in the first half of the 21st century will feature at least two revolutions. One will involve the use of electric drives rather than internal combustion engines. Another will involve powering many of these drives directly from the electric grid - as trains and trolley buses are powered today - rather than from on-board fuel. They go on to discuss marine transport, whose future is less clear, and aviation, which could see the most dramatic breaks from current practice.

With its expert analysis of the politics and business of transport, Transport Revolutions is essential reading for professionals and students in transport, energy, town planning and public policy.

1

Learning from Past Transport Revolutions

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OVERVIEW

There have been two kinds of change in human mobility since hominids began exploring the African savannah: incremental change and revolutionary change. For much of history, people made incremental improvements to their inherited technology and practices for moving about. Tinkering with wheels, sails and engines produced real transport advances, but these gradual changes do not provide understanding of what makes a transport revolution occur and where it can lead. This chapter focuses on revolutionary changes: the more dramatic instances of rapid shifts from prevailing to new mobility patterns. These sudden changes were disruptive. They broke patterns of how people relied on technology for enabling mobility and they quickly changed expectations of what the norm in trade and travel was. These revolutions thus show how transport alternatives can reshape society.

We discuss earlier revolutionary changes in this chapter to help readers of this book think about the revolutionary changes in transport that we expect will occur during the early part of the 21st century. With the possible exceptions of riding a new high-speed train in France or receiving confirmation that their first overnight express package arrived, few readers will have personally experienced a transport revolution at around the time it was launched. Our five vignettes of past transport revolutions should help evoke those dynamics of change that, sooner or later, will become a lived experience for those reading this book.

What do we mean by a revolutionary change in transport? We need a definition that provides a clear, measurable distinction between an incremental change and a revolutionary change. Here is our proposal: a transport revolution is a substantial change in a society's transport activity – moving people or freight, or both – that occurs in less than 25 years. By ‘substantial change’ we mean one or both of two things. Either something that was happening before increases or decreases dramatically, say by 50 per cent; or a new means of transport becomes prevalent to the extent that it becomes a part of the lives of 10 per cent or more of the society's population. The two key features of our definition are these: first, there is a change in how people or freight move; the mere availability of a new technology does not constitute a revolution. Second, the change occurs relatively quickly; by our definition, horseback riding would not qualify as revolutionary because its extensive adoption likely took hundreds or even thousands of years.

A new technology such as the unicycle or the Segway is not revolutionary until it results in a significant shift in the way people travel. This could take the form of a large number of new trips using the new mode or a shift to the new mode from an existing mode such as bicycling or walking. Even ‘big’ technological advances such as the Boeing 747 or the Airbus A380 aircraft do not count as revolutionary unless they result in large, rapid changes in transport activity.

Our concept of a transport revolution is thus behavioural, and differs from the usual way of characterizing transport revolutions in terms of availability of transport modes or technologies. An example of a more conventional characterization is in Table 1.1.

In this chapter, we present five examples of transport revolutions that expose the common and uncommon elements of major mobility change. Through these examples we identify some of the factors and forces that precipitate revolutionary rather than evolutionary mobility change. Our examples are meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive of the range of factors associated with a significant reconfiguration of transport technology and socioeconomic organization.

Table 1.1 Transport revolutions in human history¹

Era	Approximate Date	Ways of moving people and goods
Palaeolithic	From ca. 700,000 BP	First migrations of hominids from Africa
	From ca. 100,000 BP	First migrations of modern humans from Africa
	From ca. 60,000 BP	First migrations by sea to Australasia
Agrarian	From ca. 4000 BCE	Animal-powered transport
	From ca. 3500 BCE	Wheeled transport
	From ca. 1500 BCE	Long-distance ships in Polynesia
	1st millennium BCE	State-built roads and canals
Modern	1st millennium CE	Improvements in shipbuilding, navigation
	From early 19th century	Railways and steamships
	From late 19th century	Internal combustion engines
	From early 20th century	Air travel
	From mid 20th century	Space travel

Note: BP = before the present; BCE = before the common era (i.e. before Year 1 in the Christian dating system); CE = common era.

We begin with a transport revolution motivated by the belief that Britain's industrial revolution was generating more goods movement than existing roads and canals could accommodate. Britain's emerging railway entrepreneurs believed that the steam locomotive offered a technology that could deliver a faster and cheaper mobility option and thus generate considerable profit while meeting future demand. A belief that existing transport is inadequate and that major improvements are required can thus be a key factor spurring the investment and risk-taking required to launch revolutionary new mobility.

A different kind of transport revolution occurred during the Second World War, when the US suddenly restricted the production and use of automobiles, and the expansion of its road network, in order to accelerate military mobilization. This revolution highlights the role that governmental authority can play in reorganizing mobility when national security is perceived to be at stake. In this case, the reorganization was achieved through the imposition of gasoline rationing and industrial planning, used as tools to redesign radically the way people moved locally and between cities. By 1942, the private automobile had lost its place at the forefront of America's mobility growth. Intercity trains and local public transport were filled as they had never been before and mostly have never been since. This transport revolution ended as suddenly as it began, with a quick downsizing of military production and a rush back to car production that set the stage for a great suburban expansion.

Between 1950 and 1975, the third transport revolution we describe involved a profound transformation in the way people travelled over long distances. The rapid replacement of ocean liners by aircraft as the main means of travelling across the Atlantic represented a revolution in the intercontinental movement of people. A key element of this change was the adaptation of transport technology invented for military use – jet aircraft – to yield dramatic performance improvements in an existing mode. This example also shows how a revolution can trigger the subsequent reinvention of an apparently obsolete transport mode: in this case the reincarnation of the ocean liner as a cruise ship.

Our fourth example concerns another approach to adaptation where the innovation in technology occurs under public-sector initiative with a civilian focus. The reinvention of the passenger train began with the introduction of high-speed rail in Japan in 1964 and in Europe by 1982. Limitations of existing train technology and enterprise structure prompted innovators to ‘go back to the drawing board’ and develop a new railway system that had little in common with its predecessors. The result was a major change in the way that people travelled between cities 300–800 kilometres apart. This transport revolution reinforces the concept that mobility options can be reinvented after a period in which they experience decline in the face of competition.

From 1980 onwards, the movement of cargo by aircraft underwent a transport revolution that rounds out our consideration of these upheavals. Before this revolution, air cargo was being moved almost entirely in the holds of passenger aircraft, with limited integration into ground transport networks. Entrepreneurs at Federal Express applied ‘hub and spoke’ routing to flights carrying only cargo, integrated these with door-to-door delivery, and launched a revolutionary expansion in freight movement. From being an exceptional and expensive proposition, next-day delivery times became commonplace. This transformation in air freight service levels made it possible to develop global logistics networks that could support production and distribution on an unprecedented scale. It shows how organizational changes can be as important for a transport revolution as changes in technology.

We chose to explore these five transport revolutions because they illustrate a range of dynamics that could be expected to occur in coming transport revolutions. In their impact, they have not necessarily been the most important revolutions. Moreover, only some of their attributes will appear in the coming round of mobility changes. With an understanding of how things have happened in the past gained through review of these revolutions, there could be less surprise at the scenarios for revolutionary change presented later in the book and possibly even less surprise at the changes that will eventually occur.

Had we been seeking out transport revolutions of the greatest magnitude, rather than those that illustrate a broad spectrum of change dynamics, we might well have included the transformation of global logistics and manufacturing enabled by widespread adoption of standardized shipping containers. According to one economist, ‘The shipping container may be a close second to the Internet in the way it has changed the international economy, and in that way, our lives.’² Box 1.1 provides excerpts from a recent book that elaborates this point. We provide current data about the movement of shipping containers in Chapter 2.

BOX 1.1 SHIPPING CONTAINERS³

On April 26, 1956, a crane lifted fifty-eight aluminum truck bodies aboard an aging tanker ship moored in Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, the Ideal-X sailed into Houston, where fifty-eight trucks waited to take on the metal boxes and haul them to their destinations. Such was the beginning of a revolution.

A soulless aluminum or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end: the standard container has all the romance of a tin can. The value of this utilitarian object lies not in what it is, but how it is used. The container is at the core of a highly automated system for moving goods from anywhere, to anywhere, with a minimum of cost and complication on the way.

Merchant mariners, who had shipped out to see the world [now have only] a few hours ashore at a remote parking lot for containers, their vessel ready to weigh anchor the instant the high-speed cranes finish putting huge metal boxes off and on the ship.

... at a major container terminal, the brawny longshoremen carrying bags of coffee on their shoulders [are] nowhere to be seen.

A 35-ton container of coffeemakers can leave a factory in Malaysia, be loaded aboard a ship, and cover the 9000 miles to Los Angeles in 16 days. A day later, the container is on a unit train to Chicago, where it is transferred immediately to a truck headed for Cincinnati. The 11,000-mile trip from the factory gate to the Ohio warehouse can take as little as 22 days, a rate of 500 miles a day, at a cost lower than that of a single first-class air ticket. More than likely, no one has touched the contents, or even opened the container, along the way.

The container, combined with the computer, made it practical for companies like Toyota and Honda to develop just-in-time manufact...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: Transport Revolutions Ahead
• 1 Learning from Past Transport Revolutions
• 2 Transport Today
• 3 Transport and Energy
• 4 Transport’s Adverse Impacts
• 5 The Next Transport Revolutions
• 6 Leading the Way Forward
• Index