|
Items in cart [0] |
Questions? Call 888-624-8373 |
| [ Top of Page ] [ Home ] [ Contact Us ] [ Help ] [ The National Academies Home ] | ||
Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 146
7
Infrastructures for Movement
Past and Future
CESARE MARCHETTI
Not snow, nor rain, nor heat,
nor night keeps them from
accomplishing their appointed
courses with all speed.
Herodotus, Histories
Man is a territorial animal; the book of history could well be considered
a string of squabbles (by turns glorious or miserable but mostly bloody)
over territorial dominance. The instinct of a territorial animal is to expand
its territory as far as possible.Yet curiously, ancient empires never became
larger than an area allowing 15-day mail service from the capital. Beyond
that distance, acquisitions tended to become unstable and to split away,
indicating perhaps a lunar cycle in man's submission and trust. If the
greed of the king required more territory, he had to develop an appropriate
infrastructure to speed the messenger service. The Persian empire is a
textbook example of such development; and what Herodotus said about
the King of Persia's messengers, U.S. postal workers have adopted as a
credo.
When Marco Polo explored China, he witnessed many marvels, but
apparently nothing struck him more than the efficient Chinese mail and
messenger system and the infrastructure that supported it. Ancient civi-
lizations did not transport much in terms of mass, even by sea, but the
transportation of men and information always received the best available
technology and some extraordinary engineering efforts.
This emphasis on transporting people and information is not a cultural
imprint of Euroasiatic origin; the Amerindian civilizations found the same
solution to the same problem. In the technological context of a neolithic
culture, the Incan roads and bridges appear to be just as extraordinary an
engineering and organizational feat. Their most important function was
to speed messages carried by runners, who traveled up to 300 km a day
146
OCR for page 147
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
147
using a sophisticated relay system. The stimulus to set the high-speed
system in motion may usually have been royal letters, but important
missions were undertaken by high-ranking officials or missi dominici,
indicating a limited substitutability between the transportation of pure
information and that of people. Such behaviors and relationships, so deeply
ingrained in the animal nature of man (the "beast"), are here forever,
naturally, and can provide a solid basis for a model of the long-term
development of transportation systems.
The work of Zahavi (1981) embodies mathematically the drives of the
territorial animal. We could say that every man is a territorial animal and
that, as such, he will try to maximize the extent of the territory he uses.
Zahavi found that the constraints to this activity are time (a little more
than one hour per day is dedicated to extramural movement) and energy,
indexed here by money (15 percent of disposable income is dedicated to
transportation expenses). Within these constraints, time and money are
allocated to different means of locomotion to maximize range.
This conceptual scheme permits us to draw a general, long-term con-
clusion: what the system wants is low-cost speed (low cost is obviously
contextual). Nowadays, most of humanity walks, giving a personal ter-
ritory not far different from that of a village (about 10 square kilometers
Ekm211. In Western countries, most moving people own a car, the mean
speed of which is an order of magnitude greater than walking-about 50
km per hour (h). The resulting territory is then 100 times larger (1,000
km21. Interestingly, this mean speed has remained unchanged during the
last 50 years, suggesting the existence of a homeostatic mechanism.
The mean speed of air transport is about an order of magnitude larger
than that of a car-about 500 km/in. Thus, the jet set has a territory that
is 100 times larger than that of the car set. The final objective is obviously
to have the world as one's territory, and with the world's growing pop-
ulation, more and more sites are becoming valuable visiting points.
To belong to a city, one must have easy access to its services. Ancient
cities, be they Rome or Peking, did not become larger than a radius
that could be transited by walking or riding on public transportation for
one hour, and some spot checks indicate that the same is true today.
This means that extremely large cities, which are now coalescing here
and there, need first of all a fast transportation network. The figures
in this chapter give some quantitative glimpses of the spread of trans-
portation systems at the world level and some quantitative hints about
the future.
In his delightful collection of offbeat statistics, Zipf (1972) reported
on the hierarchical structure of city sizes. Cities can be considered
informational machines; as such, they are served well by a hierarchical
OCR for page 148
148
CESARE MARClIE~ITI
information system. But if people can move across a set of cities within
the one-hour time limit using air shuttles, some high-level functions
can then be split between the cities and synthesized through personal
movement, just as if such people were living in different quarters of
the same city. In other words, corridors such as the Bosnywash corridor
in the eastern United States and the Shinkansen corridor in Japan ac-
tually operate as single cities- at least at the level of hierarchical in-
formation processing-but it is information bound to flesh, like that of
. . . . . .
t he masse aom~nZc'.
Over the past two decades the magnetic levitation (or Maglev) train for
the next Shinkansen line has made mixed progress. Indeed, the only thing
that has remained constant during these years is the required one-hour
transit time between its terminals, Tokyo and Osaka. The obvious impli
cation is that the 70 million people who have gravitated to that strip of
land have the aspiration and potential to become part of a single city. In
the hierarchical information scheme, size is a prerequisite for power. In
other words, the Shinkansen corridor, with its 70 million people, may
become the hierarchical capital of the world, a position London held for
more than a century.
A transportation analyst looking forward in time at the development of
networks sees intense interaction among settlements on a grand scale. But
how grand? As is shown later in this chapter, the context of air trans-
portation calls for an airplane capable of operating at speeds as great as
Mach 8, a development that will reduce the transit time between any two
locations with suitable landing facilities to about one hour. The "grand
scale" will then be the world. The world is imploding into larger and
larger settlements, which makes such a global intercity air transport system
logical.
Over the long term (which is probably not all that long, considering
the time necessary to realize such huge and complex networks and the
exponential speed at which people implode into cities), transportation must
be conceived of in terms of cities. But what will such cities look like?
Doxiadis and Papaioannou (1974) in their seminal book on Ecumenopolis,
give some guidelines on the shape cities (i.e., the "super" city) will take;
basically a chicken-wire system of large mesh with blobs and smears here
and there.
In such a system, vacuum-tunnel Maglev trains would be perfect for
the job of transporting people, accelerating at 8 Gs for half the trip and
decelerating the other half. From my earlier analysis ( 1983), the Maglev
system should begin operations about the year 2000. Thus, the Shin-
kansen experiment will give us a solid context for our thinking about
the future.
OCR for page 149
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
149
METHODOLOGY
Most of the analysis undertaken here uses a version of Darwinian ideas
incorporated into Lotka's (1956) equations of competition between species
in ecological niches. At the first level the analogy is formal, but the fit
is excellent. At the second level, biological systems and social systems
are information systems. The analogy may be substantial at this level.
A second aspect of the methodology is that it is just phenomenological.
Thus, only facts are examined, and they are organized using the model.
Explanations are not usually given, but the reader is always free to anolv
his or her own to the facts described.
The methodology looks for invariants in sets of measurements. These
invariants can be constants- for example, the human mortality for au-
tomobile accidents or the energy input-output ratio in energetically close
agricultures or they can be functional relationships, that is, quantitative
rules or "laws." In this second area the models derived from a Darwinian
concept of the working system proved to be of widest application. In these
models the time dynamics is reduced to a competition between subsystems.
Much has been written about these models, which have been applied
extensively in genetics and ecology. A schematic treatment is reported in
the appendix to this chapter.
The examples of competition between subsystems can be reduced to
three cases (or models).
~ 1 ~
Case 1: The Malthusian Population
This population represents a single species growing in a niche of limited
resources. This is the case of self-competition-that is, competition among
individuals for resources. The classic biological example is a colony of
bacteria growing in a bottle of broth. When a population cannot be enum-
erated, as in the case of bacteria, the growth phenomena follow the same
rule-for example, the growth of a sunflower is measured by its height
and the growth of a road network is measured by its length.
This case is modeled using logistic equations. Because of the many
constraints that must be satisfied, it is easy to use this case improperly.
For this reason many failures (in the area of human population growth,
see Pearl, 1924, for example) occur when it is applied.
The Malthusian population case is mapped using three-parameter lo-
gistics. The parameters are not normally known externally; they are de-
termined by the best fit method. Socioeconomic examples are the growth
of the registered car population in Italy after World War II (Figure 7-1)
and the growth of the telegraph system in the United States (Figure 7-21.
OCR for page 150
150
CESARE MARCHEITI
Fraction (fl
10'
10°
1o-l
10-2
-90%
-50%
-10% l
1% ~1 1
J1 970
Fit = 22 yr
1 1 1
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Year
FIGURE 7-1 Car registrations following World War II in Italy. Saturation point
= 20 million cars.
In Figure 7-1 the logistic equation for car registration is linearized, using
the Fisher and Pry (1970) transform, logged - {).This presentation fa-
cilitates graphic handling of these data and the comparison of sets of
curves in the same graph. The saturation point, not visible in the graph,
is given numerically, as is the time constant (At), which is the time required
to go from 10 to 90 percent of the saturation level.
Case 2: One-to-One Competition
In this case a new species is introduced into a niche previously occupied
by another species. Haldane (1924) applied this case to biology when
studying the penetration of a mutant, and Fisher and Pry (1970) applied
it in a number of examples of market substitution. The treatment of case
2 is much easier than that of case 1, especially if one is interested in the
ratios of population numbers or market fractions of the competitors.
Case 2 is treated with two-parameter logistics. Because one species
filled the niche at time zero, the sum of the individuals gives the size of
the niche. An example of this case is the substitution of cars for horses
OCR for page 151
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
lo1
10°
:
10-1
lo-2
151
/
190j~
At= 54yr
1 900
Year
1 950
FIGURE 7-2 Miles of wire in the Western Union telegraph system in the United
States. Saturation point = 2.3 million mi.
for personal transportation in the United States. The sum of horses and
cars is the actual level of personal transportation. This is an example of
simple substitution. Over about 20 years most of the personal transpor-
tation in the United States shifted from horse to car (see chapter 81. The
substitution is not easily explained, however, because cost and speed were
roughly the same.
Case 3: Multiple Competition
This case is a generalization of case 2 in which new species are intro-
duced sequentially into the same niche; a few thus are present at any given
time in a phase-in or phase-out configuration.
Case 3, which was originally developed by Marchetti and Nakicenovic
(1979), is treated with a mixture of interacting logistics and transition
functions. Multiple competition is in fact the rule in the real world, and
the preceding cases can be considered simplifications of this general case
when perturbations from other species are considered small. By deter-
mining niche shares or market shares of competitors, one can construct
the life cycle of each competitor, introducing only two parameters in the
equations. The parameters may change over time, but they change inter-
actively so that no external information is needed. An example of this
case is the competition among primary energies for world markets (Figure
OCR for page 152
152
1o2
101
10°
10-1
10-2
_ , 0.30
Oily
1850 1900 1950
Year
FIGURE 7-3 Primary energy substitution worldwide.
CESARE MAR CHETTI
on
o.so
0.70 c
o
0.50
0.10
0.01
2000 2050
7-31. In Figure 7-3, the coordinates are those of a Fisher-Pry transform.
The great stability of the dynamics of the substitution for such a long time
results from the fact that price elasticity and shadow prices always have
the correct values. Nakicenovic (1987) shows the same analysis for the
competition of transport infrastructures in the United States.
This methodology was originally used for diagnostics that is, to have
a compact, consistent description of what happened. With the accumu-
lation of analyzed cases, however, it became clear that actual systems are
extremely stable in time although subject to variable levels of noise. That
is, the subjacent equations are followed for decades and centuries, which
led to the use of the diagnostics in a forecasting mode. Many precautions
were taken to ensure that booby traps common to such predictions were
avoided. It was then concluded that forecasting within a period corre-
sponding to about 50 percent of the time constant of any particular sub-
system is safe.
AIR TRANSPORT
This section briefly surveys the dynamics of air transport worldwide to
show these models at work. The kind of object studied is immaterial,
provided that the appropriate indicators of its definition are identified.
Efficient indicators for air transport can be either ton-kilometers per
year (ton-km/year) or passenger kilometers per year (pass-km/year), if
OCR for page 153
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
153
this subset activity is analyzed. For individual airplanes the preferred
indicator is ton-kilometers per hour, the "flux" of payload.
As shown in Figure 7-4, air transport since World War II can be mapped
with the utmost precision. The saturation point of 200 billion ton-km/year
was calculated by best fitting. It is remarkable that the increases in the
price of jet fuel in 1974 and 1979 had no effect on the performance of
the system. Such homeostatic behavior is characteristic of these large
systems. When an external condition changes, the system rearranges itself
internally to hold its trajectory.
The air transport system is a huge "clockwork" system made up of
smaller and smaller interlocking wheels. If a general Darwinian view holds
for the similarity in behavior of subsystems at different hierarchical levels,
the smaller wheels will also fit in the same mathematical pattern. For
example, Lufthansa Airlines, which accounts for only a few percent of
world air traffic, fits perfectly (Figures 7-5, 7-6, and 7-71. Figure 7-6
(ton-kilometers per year) is similar to Figure 7-5 (passenger-kilometers
per year) except that it includes cargo. Passengers are by definition cal-
culated at 80 kilograms each. In both figures' Lufthansa appears to be on
a saturation course, a situation rarely perceived as such inside companies
Fraction (I)
2
1o1
l
10°
1o-l
- 99%
90°/0
- 50%
- 10%
tar
,,~B707
10-2 by' I ' ' ' '
it
a,'
i' B747
·'
At = 32 yr
1950 1960 1970 1980
Year
1990 2000 2010
FIGURE 7-4 Air traffic (billion ton-kilometers per year) in the Western world.
Saturation point = 200 billion ton-kmJyr.
OCR for page 154
154
.. .. .
CESARE AIARCHE7TI
Fraction (f)
2
10
l
;~
10°
10-1
10-2
- 99%
- 90%
- 50%
- 10%
1 °/^ ~
90%~ ·/
I'
·/
1 974 ~
`^ At=21yr
i/
;;
~7
. . ,
1 ~. . .
1960 1970
Year
1980 1 990
FIGURE 7-5 Lufthansa Airlines: billions of passenger-kilometers per year. Sat-
uration point = 25 billion pass-km yr.
themselves. Often a decline in growth rate is interpreted as overcautious-
ness in management and investment, and ends in excessive capitalization
and debts. Figure 7-7 shows equipment, following the rules of the game,
for both quantity and quality. When the management of a company does
not perceive the externality of the rules, overinvestment will result that
is, the company will exceed in a nontransitory way its intrinsic saturation
level of about 100 airplanes. Incidentally (transitory) mistakes appeared
when the first batch of B-747s was purchased.
It is practical to measure the tools for operating an air transport system-
that is, airplanes in terms of their function. Airplanes can be classified
according to their flux (how many ton-kilometers per hour they can trans-
port). Thus, an airplane is again a very small wheel in the air transport
system, quantified homogeneously. Figure 7-8 plots successful long-range
passenger aircraft introduced during the last 40 years, using the dates of
their first commercial appearance. This figure condenses the description
of some of the deep mechanisms that connect airplane performance and
air traffic. The thin dashed line represents world air traffic, expressed in
passenger-kilometers per hour; the upper line represents the evolution of
first-level airplane capacity, also expressed in passenger-kilometers per
OCR for page 155
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
155
hour. The two lines are parallel, indicating that when first-level airplanes
were introduced, their flux was a constant fraction of the traffic's flux.
Because machines grow horizontally with traffic, forecasting traffic per-
mits forecasting the performance of successful airplanes, usually a soul-
wearing decision for airframe makers. In this context an essential feature
for the success of the Concorde was lacking: it was too small by a factor
of almost three.
About 4,000 airplanes have been in service with commercial air com-
panies (basically, the members of the International Air Transport Asso-
ciation) over the last 30 years, despite an approximately 50-fold increase
in traffic. Presumably, 4,000 airplanes is the minimum number needed
to satisfy the time and space configuration of travel demand. (The number
of oil tankers in service is about the same.)
According to the forecasting power of the equations, air traffic will
Fraction (I)
1o2
1o1
10°
10-1
10-2
r 99%
_ 90%
- 50%
- 10%
1% /:
1950 1960 1970
83% -/
1 976 a,~
1'
..'
i' fit= 23yr
94%~
, I I ~
1980 1 990
Year
FIGURE 7-6 Lufthansa Airlines: billions of ton-kilometers per year. Saturation
point = 5 billion ton-km yr.
OCR for page 156
156
102
1o1
10°
-1
10
10-2
CESARE A1ARCHE~I
Fraction (f)
- 90%
- 50%
- 10%
1%
/ (100)
1963 ad -
fit = 28 yr
-
.~
.~7
~ __
B747
fit - 32 yr
5'
1950 1960 1970
Year
1980 1990
FIGURE 7-7 Lufthansa Airlines, planes in service. Saturation point = 100 planes.
increase by about 25-30 percent during the next 15 years. Thus, using
the rules observed here, a stretched B-747 (Jumbo 1000) may well satisfy
this demand. Airports need only plan then for an increase in throughput
and pulse intensity. Engine designers should not be too preoccupied either,
because lighter materials, better aerodynamics, and increased engine ef-
ficiency (requiring less fuel on board) will take care of the extra payload
without the need for major engineering breakthroughs.
The situation appears more lively, however, if we zoom ahead in time.
The general idea is that more income will lead to using a larger share of
the traveling hour for faster (and more expensive) transport modes. An
analysis of the intercity passenger-kilometers of different systems in the
United States (see Figure 8-15 in Nakicenovic, this volume), reveals
airways' increasing market share in intercity travel, with a possible in
OCR for page 164
164
lol
10°
lo-l
lo-2
CESARE MARCHETTI
f
1 853 J
lo/
At= 56yr
/
1800 1850 1900
Year
FIGURE 7- 1 6 Railway systems for 40 countries worldwide, plotted by dates when
system construction began.
good target for Keynesian tactics (i.e., more public works) to counter the
effects of the current recession.
MOVING ENERGY
Energy products are the largest single item moved around on the earth's
surface, and they occupy a dominant position in the world's bulk trade
and internal transport. This section describes a product life cycle for each
of the primary energy sources coal, crude oil, natural gas, and nuclear
power that have a commercial (long-distance) impact. The section is
intended to show where we are going in terms of energy, to indicate the
potential quantities involved, and to suggest some appropriate technolo-
g~es.
This analysis is based on the Darwinian competition for market shares
among the primary energy sources: wood, coal, crude oil, natural gas,
and "X," or a source yet to come (called fusion here). This competition
has been stable over the past 150 years, with three energy crises and their
related price increases, wars, and depressions having little effect on the
mechanism.
OCR for page 165
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
1o2
1o1
> 10°
1
-2 ~
10
165
I (I) '(UK) (NL)
~ ~E)
I ~I I ~
1982
1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990
Year
)1
10°
10-1
~ (EEC_9)
197/
i'
,'
f ~ t=24yr
10-2 ~ ' ' ' ' ' '
1948 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985
Year
FIGURE 7-17 Construction of motorways in Europe. B: Belgium; EEC-g: Eu-
ropean Economic Community; F: France; ERG: Federal Republic of Germany; I:
Italy; NL: the Netherlands; and UK: United Kingdom.
OCR for page 166
166
103 -
-
a)
~10 _
o
._
-
3
C)
< ~10 _
o
0.1
CESARE MAR CHE=I
Asymptote ~ 300 1 O9t
200 109t
Actual
, /
Integrated coal demand
Forecast /
/ Total energy demand
Annual
Demand
1 800
1 900
Year
2000
FIGURE 7-18 World coal consumption (in billions of tons).
2100
Because absolute quantities are needed and the life cycle is measured
in terms of market shares, it was necessary to assume that a mean world
energy consumption growth of 2.3 percent (which has been the case during
the last 200 years) is acceptable for the next 150 years. If the world
population then doubles every 70 years (it now doubles every 30 years),
world per capita energy consumption in 2150 will equal the present level
in the United States.
Coal
Coal reached its maximum market share penetration
in the 1920s, and
it has been losing ground ever since. Because of the expanding total energy
market, however, the absolute quantity of coal consumption continued to
grow; it has now reached its maximum level (this has occurred during the
last few years). Consequently, the global infrastructure for coal will shrink
although its geographical distribution will inevitably change.
Despite this phase-out, the amounts that will be used cumulatively are
still impressive: about 100 billion tons against the 200 billion tons already
extracted (Figure 7-184. Approximately 3 billion tons of coal are processed
each year. The straight line in Figure 7-18 represents total energy demand
worldwide as interpolated and extrapolated from historical data, adopting
OCR for page 167
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
167
the historical mean rate of growth of 2.3 percent per year. The actual coal
demand curve approaches total energy demand in the 1920s when the
main source of primary energy was coal, as shown by the market pene-
tration curve (coal then covered about 80 percent of the market). This
total energy demand does not contain the Kondratief oscillation; thus, it
may be locally incorrect. The upper curve gives the cumulative amount
of coal consumed.
Most of this coal is now used in making electricity and, at a much lower
level, steel. In developed countries, nuclear energy appears to be the
inevitable competitor for the base load production of electricity, and steel
comes increasingly from recycling through the use of electric steel pro-
cesses. Thus, the geographical distribution of coal use will presumably
move toward developing countries, which are also more willing to accept
the pollution burden. A special case is China, which is now almost com-
pletely dependent on coal and is ready to use 10 times as much.
Use of the same analytical methods to look at the development of the
electrical system and at the share of coal-generated electricity (to see if
absolute quantities match) would probably reveal that there will be too
much coal. This situation opens the way to molten-iron coal burning, a
process in which electricity and synthetic gas are produced at the same
time.
Molten-iron coal burning is a process in which coal is dissolved in iron
to remove impurities, including sulfur, before injecting oxygen in the iron
bath to burn the carbon. The resulting product, 1400°C gas, is then used
to produce electricity and subsequently to synthesize methanol (methanol
is formed from carbon monoxide and hydrogen). Because the coal is
burned at the mine, long-distance exportation of electricity and methanol
would occur, thereby avoiding local pollution as well as train traffic
pollution. This process, which is being studied at the Nuclear Research
Center in Julich, Federal Republic of Germany (Hafele et al., 1986), has
been christened "zero emissions." It is a configuration and process that
may well lie within the constraints and skills of developed countries.
Oil
Oil, the so-called lifeline of Western countries, has been selling at about
the same level for the past few years. According to the product life-cycle
analysis (see Figure 7-3), the use of oil has just peaked in terms of market
shares, and it is now peaking in terms of absolute quantities. Because the
share is falling sharply, the expansion of energy markets will compensate
for the fall for only another 20 years (Figure 7-191. Apparently, however,
there will be no growth after the market share peaks, as there has been
OCR for page 168
168
In
o
103
o
-
o
-
E
In
-
o
10
1
0.1
C,ESARE MARCHETTI
Forecast
Actual
, / .
Hated oil demand
1
total energy demand/
/
-
-
, 400 1 09 tons
Annual oil demand
1 900
Year
2000
FIGURE 7-19 World oil consumption (in billions of tons).
2100
for coal. The infrastructure for oil therefore has no reason to grow globally,
although its geographic distribution may change considerably during the
next 100 years, before the market share finally falls to 1 percent. Because
the size of oil tankers is closely linked to the amount of oil traded overseas
and because more accurate exploration reveals oil deposits closer to the
final consumers, a continuous decrease in the tonnage of tankers can be
expected, a trend that is already occurring. Thus, neither port facilities
for megatankers nor megaterminals will be necessary.
Because the demand for coal and nuclear energy will cut into the demand
for heavy oils and because progress in oil refining has made upgrading
relatively easy, all of the oil on the market will probably be used to produce
transportation fuels. (Natural gas may provide substantial help in refining
operations by improving the hydrogen content of the feed, but this should
not influence the infrastructure for gas.) Although oil appears to coast and
slow down on what it achieved, the amount of oil still to be extracted is
impressive, about 300 billion tons against the lOO billion already extracted.
(Estimates about resources are always dated, but this 300-billion-ton es-
timate appears reasonable for the time span considered here.)
As it is for coal, the demand for oil can be dynamic in the spatial sense,
but it is basically business as usual. Almost 4 billion tons of oil are
OCR for page 169
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVElIENT
169
processed per year, a mass roughly equivalent to that of coal. Its market
share did not go as high as that of coal, however, because its introduction
into the market was a bit "late" in historical terms.
Natural Gas
If coal and oil sound much like the railways more of the same, but
running down the most interesting prospect seems to be natural gas, at
least within our life span.
The product life cycle of gas displays nothing unusual (Figure 7-201.
Because its next competitor (nuclear energy) was introduced a good 70
years later, however, natural gas has had time to gain a large market share,
which will reach a maximum like coal, 70 percent around the year
2040. Above all, natural gas is facing a larger and larger energy market.
Quantities of natural gas will then increase by an order of magnitude over
. .
present quantities.
This expansion will be realized by the development of networks in such
countries as Brazil and India. The largest pipelines will also increase their
capacities proportionally. This means that gas pipelines must be developed
to carry 10 times as much gas as the present 58-inch (in.) pipe, the largest
in use. Because the amount of gas transported grows almost in proportion
to the cubic power of the diameter of a pipeline (if subsonic), a doubling
of pipeline size to 120 in. can be expected. And because economic distance
Jo'
10°
10 ~
Fraction (f)
- 90%
- 50%
- 1 0% ~
/
Actual Forecast
it\/
,~
'1~'
1900 1950 2000 2050 2100 2150
Year
FIGURE 7-20 Product life cycle of natural gas, worldwide.
OCR for page 170
170
CESARE MARCHED
grows linearly with the diameter of a pipeline, these trunk lines can be
expected to carry gas 5,000-6,000 km from the source. Obviously, the
implications of such developments will be political as well as infrastruc-
tural.
No attempt is made here to unveil what will happen in the liquefied
natural gas (LNG) area after 1995. It is possible that new cooling methods
will make LNG more appealing and that large LNG tankers will develop
in response to volume trading. This kind of analysis is probably possible
using Darwinian methodology.
As for past and future extraction, natural gas production is just in its
initial stage. The cumulative amount extracted to date is only a negligible
share (about 2 percent) of the cumulative total: about one trillion cubic
meters or, in equivalent energy, about six times that of oil.
Nuclear Energy
As shown in Figure 7-20, nuclear energy is projected to succeed natural
gas as the world's primary energy source in the latter half of the twenty-
first century. The real breakthrough in the use of nuclear energy will come
when electricity grids are saturated sometime during the next 10 years in
France and during the next 30 years in most of the Western world (see
Figure 7-124. At that point, nuclear energy must incorporate an energy
vector that is flexible, transportable, and storable presumably, hydrogen.
Because hydrogen travels well (much like natural gas), the primary energy
generators (nuclear plants) can be located far from consumer areas, ending
the uneasy cohabitation of today. In addition, they can be extremely large
( 100 times the size of current plants), making the system again reasonable.
A new continental pipeline network suitable for hydrogen may then be
installed during the next Kondratief cycle (1995-2050), instituting the
first round of a stable energy infrastructure. Each continent will have a
few generation points, presumably located on its shores, that are capable
of producing hydrogen in the terawatt range. Like those for the Maglev
trains, the signs of such a development should appear in the next 10-20
years.
CONCLUSION
This tour d' horizon set out to elucidate problems in the deployment of
transportation infrastructures and to identify techniques that might generate
consistent descriptions and forecasts. At the level described here, changes
generally occur slowly, even when technological progress appears hectic,
because social absorption is slow. Thus, choices must be long-sighted and
well timed, and this is not easy.
OCR for page 171
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
171
Great breakthroughs are usually controlled by context. Context and its
links with innovation can be deepened beyond the cursory analysis pre-
sented here, perhaps just through sheer research effort. The most en-
couraging discovery made in undertaking the analysis was the extreme
dynamic stability of the transportation system and subsystems at all hier-
archical levels.
REFERENCES
Debecker, A., and T. Modis (Digital Equipment Corp., Geneva, Switzerland). 1986.
Determination of the uncertainties in S-curve logistic fits. Paper submitted to the Sixth
International Symposium on Forecasting, Paris, June 15-18, 1986.
Doxiadis, C. A., and J. C. Papaioannou. 1974. Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the
Future. Athens: Athens Center of Ekistics.
Fisher, J. C., and R. H. Pry. 1970. A Simple Substitution Model of Technological Change.
70-C-215. Schenectady, N.Y.: General Electric Company; see also Technological Fore-
casting and Social Change 3:75-88, 1971.
Hafele, W., H. garnet, S. Messner, M. Strubegger, and J. Anderer. 1986. Novel integrated
energy systems: The case of zero emissions. In Sustainable Development of the Bio-
sphere, W. C. Clark and R. E. Munn, eds. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Haldane, J. B. S. 1924. The mathematical theory of natural and artificial selection. Trans-
actions, Cambridge Philosophical Society 23:19-41.
Kondratief, N. D. 1926. Die langen Wellen der Konjunktur. Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft
und Sozialpolitik 56:573-609.
Lotka, A. J. 1956. Elements of Mathematical Biology. New York: Dover.
Marchetti, C., and N. Nakicenovic. 1979. The Dynamics of Energy Systems and the
Logistic Substitution Model. RR-79-13. Laxenburg, Austria: International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis.
Marchetti, C. 1983. On a Fifty Years Pulsation in Human Affairs: Analysis of Some Physical
Indicators. PP-83-5. Laxenburg, Austria: International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis.
Mensch, G. 1975. Das technologische Patt. Frankfurt, FRG: Umschau Verlag. English
translation: Mensch, G. 1979. Stalemate in Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger.
Montroll, E. W., and N. S. Goel. 1971. On the Volterra and other nonlinear models of
interacting populations. Reviews of Modern Physics 43(2):231.
Nakicenovic, N. 1979. Software Package for the Logistic Substitution Model. RR-79-12.
Laxenburg, Austria: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Nakicenovic, N. 1984. Growth to Limits, Long Waves and the Dynamics of Technology.
Ph.D. dissertation. University of Vienna.
Nakicenovic, N. 1987. Transportation and Energy Systems in the US. WP-87-01. Lax-
enburg, Austria: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Nukem. 1984. Nukem Market Report on the Nuclear Fuel Cycle. p. 18. NUKEM GesmbH,
Hanau, Federal Republic of Germany.
Pearl, R. 1924. Studies in Human Biology. Baltimore, Md.: Williams & Wilkins.
Peschel, M., and W. Mende. 1983. Leben wir in einer Volterra Welt? Berlin: Akademie
Verlag.
Verhulst, P. F. 1845. Nouveaux M6moires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres
et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 18:1-38.
OCR for page 172
172
C'ESARE MARCHET1I
Zahavi, Y. 1981. The UMOT-Urban Interactions. DOT-RSPA-DPB 10/7. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation.
Zipf, G. K. 1972. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to
Human Ecology. New York: Hafner. (Facsimile of 1949 edition.)
APPENDIX
The Darwinian behavior of population is described in general in sim-
plified form by the famous Volterra-Lotka equations:
- iNi - AijNiNj,
d! 1=!
where Ni is the number of individuals of species i. (The properties of the
solutions to these equations have been described by Montroll and Goel,
1971, and in the recent treatise by Peschel and Mende, 1983.) The quan-
tities a, A, and A are parameters for which a physical interpretation is
possible; Hi is the rate of growth of population i in the absence of predation,
and Hi is the cross section of interaction between population i and popu-
lation j.
Special Cases: The Malthusian Case
A physically intuitive example of this case is a population of bacteria
growing in a bottle of broth (Verhulst, 18451. The bacteria act as machinery
to transform chemicals present in the broth into bacteria. The rate of this
transformation (other things, e.g., temperature, being equal) is propor-
tional to the number of bacteria (the transforming machinery) and the
concentration of the transformable chemicals.
All transformable chemicals will ultimately be transformed into bacterial
bodies. Thus, to use homogeneous units, one can measure broth chemicals
in terms of bacterial bodies. N(t) is therefore the number of bacteria at
time t, and N is the amount of transformable chemicals at time 0, before
multiplication starts. The Verhulst equation can then be written as:
= aN (N-N),
dt
whose solution is
(1)
N
1 + e (at + b)
(2)
where b is an integration constant, sometimes written as to; a is a constant
OCR for page 173
INFRASTRUCTURES FOR MOVEMENT
173
that is independent of the size of the population. Thus, there is no proximity
feedback. If we divide both sides of equation 2 by N. extract the expo-
nential term, and then take the logarithm of both sides, we obtain
log 1 f f-at + b,
where
N
f-=
N
N is often called the niche, and the growth of a population is given as the
fraction of the niche it fills. Obviously, this analysis has been done with
the assumption there are no competitors. A single species grows to match
resources (N) in a Malthusian fashion.
One-to-One Competition Case
This case was originally treated by Haldane (1924) and reported by
Lotka (19561. It deals with the simple case of genetic competition from
a mutant; that is, a new variety (1) has a reproductive advantage, k, over
the old variety (21. This means that at every generation the ratio of the
number of individuals in the two varieties will be changed by 1/~1-k).
If n is the number of generations starting from n = 0, then
Ro
<1 - k)n
N _
_ ,
N2
where
att= 0.
° N:
If k is small, as it usually is in biology (typically 10-3), then
N. Ro
=
N2 e-kn
(3)
(4)
We are now back to equation 2, except for the very favorable fact that
we have an initial condition (Ro) instead of a final condition (N). This
means that in relative terms the evolution of the system is not sensitive
to the size of the niche, an extremely useful property for forecasting.
OCR for page 174
174
CESARE MARCHE~ITI
Multiple Competition Case
The concept underlying the package developed for multiple competition
(Nakicenovic, 1979) is the reduction of multiple competition to a set of
double competitions by bunching competitors. The treatment is not gen-
eral. In fact, oscillatory behavior, a characteristic of the solutions of the
Volterra-Lotka equations, does not appear. In the hundreds of actual cases
in which this concept was applied, the fits obtained were excellent, and
the objects studied did not oscillate.
Derivation of the equation parameters is usually undertaken by least-
squares fitting on the Fisher-Pry transform that is, log f/~1-f). This
may require further investigation, however, because visual fitting by ex-
perts results in parameter values that are more efficient for forecasting.
An analysis of the effect of noise in the data on calculation of the size of
the niche in Malthusian growth has been carried out by Debecker and
Modis (1986).
Representative terms from entire chapter:
air transport
