Cities and Their Vital Systems Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future (1988) / Chapter Skim
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7 Infrastructures for Movement: Past and Future
7 Infrastructures for Movement: Past and Future
Pages 146-174
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From page 146... ...
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.
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From page 147... ...
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.
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From page 148... ...
As is shown later in this chapter, the context of air transportation 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.
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From page 149... ...
The methodology looks for invariants in sets of measurements. These invariants can be constants- for example, the human mortality for automobile 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.
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From page 150... ...
.This presentation facilitates 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)
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From page 151... ...
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 determining niche shares or market shares of competitors, one can construct the life cycle of each competitor, introducing only two parameters in the equations.
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From page 152... ...
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.
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From page 153... ...
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.
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From page 154... ...
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
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From page 155... ...
About 4,000 airplanes have been in service with commercial air companies (basically, the members of the International Air Transport Association) over the last 30 years, despite an approximately 50-fold increase in traffic.
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From page 156... ...
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
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From page 157... ...
The increase will put a strain on the size of airplanes, which may stimulate the installation of Maglev trains in the most intense corridors. During the present Kondratief cycle, air travel at the world level has increased by a factor of more than 50.
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From page 158... ...
158 1o2 1 0 I 10° 10-1 10-2 FIGURE 7-9 Aircraft engine performance. CESARE MARCHEITI Fraction (f)
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From page 159... ...
In the next Kondratief cycle the airplane may be reserved for intercontinental (and possibly interplanetary?
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From page 160... ...
To this end, the Malthusian populations of innovations (each of which is characterized only by its date of commercial introduction) were measured in relation to their "markets" (Figure 7-139.
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From page 161... ...
in the Western world. Saturation point = 350 GW.
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From page 162... ...
For example, every innovation wave of new primary energies, so important for the development of new transportation systems, is led by a new primary energy source (Figure 714~. Today's wave has been led by nuclear energy.
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From page 163... ...
Curiously, once they had been started, motorways grew on their own, without any apparent relation to the number of cars in the country. Figure 7-17 shows the development of motorways in selected countries in Europe and for nine countries of the European Economic Community taken together.
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From page 164... ...
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 technolog~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)
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From page 165... ...
B: Belgium; EEC-g: European Economic Community; F: France; ERG: Federal Republic of Germany; I: Italy; NL: the Netherlands; and UK: United Kingdom.
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From page 166... ...
. 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)
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From page 167... ...
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 processes. Thus, the geographical distribution of coal use will presumably move toward developing countries, which are also more willing to accept the pollution burden.
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From page 168... ...
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.
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From page 169... ...
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.
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From page 170... ...
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 twentyfirst century.
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From page 171... ...
The most encouraging discovery made in undertaking the analysis was the extreme dynamic stability of the transportation system and subsystems at all hierarchical levels. REFERENCES Debecker, A., and T
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From page 172... ...
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.
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From page 173... ...
Obviously, this analysis has been done with the assumption there are no competitors. A single species grows to match resources (N)
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From 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.
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