No Need To Revolutionise Transportation Tech, It’s Been Done Already

There’s a higher chance today of being run over by an electric scooter, or an electric bicycle, than a car. This may of course not hold true across the world, after all, on the North Pole, the only time you can get run over by anything is the end of the year, and it’s going to be by Santa and his nine reindeers, the first of which might also pass you its chronic cold judging by its red nose. Can someone give Rudolph some paracetamol already?!? Of course, on the thermometrically opposite end of the world, you won’t be run over by anything, because everyone walks or in a worst-case scenario, there’s an out of control camel, but that’s mostly it.

Transportation has been on humans’ minds for millennia, and while we’d like to think it’s commonplace everywhere, even a modern 80 days around the world would expose the inequalities of transportation across the globe, and that would still be just scratching the surface. One of my favourite writers, Jeffrey Clos, who by now I think has established a supremacy of knowledge on all things electric transportation — do check out his blog — got me thinking the other day. Just as Jeffrey, I consider myself a technologist, and frankly, the faster our tech evolves, the more of us will identify as technologists simply because it affects our lives more and thus becomes a more intriguing topic to delve into. When it comes to transportation tech, however, the deeper I crawl into the rabbit-hole, the more I realise it has little or nothing to do with solving an actual problem — something that technology is otherwise ought to do.

Technological arrogance of the 21st century

With the reboot of the electric car, because let’s face it, Elon has nothing to do with their success and there’s plenty of history and facts to prove that, something quite bizarre started surfacing in tech. A sort of technological arrogance that because we’re in the 21st century, we must know better and thus everything we imagine today is implicitly better than yesterday’s tech.

It’s true that silicon has made our tech smaller, but not always and not necessarily better.

While some of ye might go “oh, God, not another one of those back in my days tech sermons please”, let me remind you that technology is science, and science is meant to be pragmatic. When old technology proves to satisfy all needs and does so at the least possible cost, all data indicates that regardless of its age, it’s viable. Far be it from me to claim that electric cars for instance are unnecessary, though they do present a new wave of problems, but transportation tech innovations have gone a lot further than just your bog-standard electric car, and Jeffrey’s blog is proof of that.

What all 21st century transportation tech wants to sell us without exception, is the idea, that it’s better than what we already have, that yesterday’s transportation is inefficient, environmentally unfriendly and limits mobility when in fact none of that is true. Nearly every time, the 21st century proposal to solving individual and mass transit, or transportation of goods is barely on-par with tried and tested solutions, or a far worse option both short and long-term, which brings me to my next point.

Innovation for the sake of innovation?

I’ll forgive you for thinking that the biggest nonsense that sees the light of day and the infinite canvas of the World Wide Web must come from our planet’s favourite Dr. Delusion, the sole owner of the “let that sink in” meme, Mr. Musk, because you’d be wrong. When it comes to transportation, his vacuum tubes, Cybertrucks, and other nonsensical ideas are among the sanest, albeit still maddeningly stupid. There are plenty of ideas just as bad and far-far worse. What’s common?

The tech world has a fetishistic need to “innovate” for the sake of innovation, though looking more closely it’s for the sake of easy money.

Because, going back to my first point, once you declare your solution to be innovative, that implicitly means it’s better than our existing tech, so let’s all jump on the bandwagon of the “new, disruptive and revolutionary” without taking any real look at whether that’s true, feasible and at all necessary.

One of the latest instalments of “moronic tech nobody asked for” is SwyftCities’ cable pods for individual transport. The entire project is based on nothing more than a so-called successful implementation at Google. To quote them:

In 2019, Google needed a tool to help them better connect their campuses and allow for more dense, multi-use campus development. Transportation solutions of all types were reviewed, and none solved the district-level campus connectivity problem. — Swyftcities.com

Because clearly, what works in a tech campus, works across an entire city. You’d think that tech companies, especially at that scale, would understand the complexities of scaling technologies, but no. Sanity, foresight, and even common sense be damned. Even a non-tech person can very quickly see the myriad of virtually unsolvable issues a network of gondolas would create, but hey, innovation for the sake of innovation, right?

Of course, don’t for a second think Swyftcities is alone in their ludicrous “efforts to reimagine transportation”. Flying cars and personal drones are even worse. Self-driving cars are all but unnecessary, not to mention not deployable at scale, and the straddling bus, or the Transit Elevated Bus has already proven to be a massive flop for obvious reasons, while electric buses are also a highly debatable idea. Let’s not even start with the gazillions of electric scooters that already plague our cities, and pollute our canals, monorails and Skybuses never really caught on for similarly obvious reasons and Elon’s Earth to Earth rocket-powered transportation is just as stupid as everything else in this long series of unnecessary inventions our so-called technologists keep coming up with, while ignoring the deafening alarm-bells in their own heads pointing to onset insanity driven by nothing else but fame and money, speaking of which…

The “American excuse” that isn’t…

The world — roughly 8 billion people — have tacitly accepted the perpetuated myth that good ol’ Uncle Sam is number one in everything, and whatever inept idea it has, it must be the one to disseminate across the planet. Don’t get me wrong, America, as in the United States of America, have contributed to our wee planet’s evolution by a fair amount over their 240+ years of existence, but in the grand scheme of things with a population of just above 330 million, America has nowhere near the authority it thinks it has on anything, and especially not on transit and transportation tech. With just over 4.2% of the Earth’s population, one could argue it represents a negligible number in ideology and perspective on life. It sure tries to consistently punch above its weight, and as admirable as that may be, it’s also its achilles heel in any objective, pragmatic conversation.

America — whether Americans like to hear this or not — is a great example of how to create an inefficient, dysfunctional, borderline dystopian society in every possible way. A sparsely populated country, states with very different ideologies and political tendencies, equipped with all the skewed perceptions of reality that new money can enshrine on a nation. It’s no wonder that many Americans — quite innocently I might add — think the world should follow in their footsteps, and should model itself after the American model, including transportation of both humans and goods.

America is the country where going on a “road-trip” is on-par with owning a gun and exercising one’s freedom. Whether that’s good for anyone else but their ego, becomes entirely irrelevant. On the other hand, on most other continents, telling someone to drive 2000 miles (ca. 3,219 km) “for fun”, 99/100 times is like trying to convince them to rub their eyes with tabasco.

What Americans need to understand, is that their love of cars and the American context is rarely if ever representative of every other nation out there.

If it came down to $$$ numbers alone, rebuilding the entirety of the United States in a more efficient configuration, would cost less than the rest of the world adopting American-suggested transit solutions.

The 20th century solved it already

The main reason none of the new transit and transport “solutions” make sense is largely because we have solved these problems ages ago. Just like electric cars were mass-produced and viable over 100 years ago, we’ve also been using trains, metro lines, trams, trolley-buses, bicycles and tricycles very successfully for many decades now.

Trains in particular have evolved to such an extent that even flying starts to make less of a sense and far more economical. A good network of trolley-buses and trams can turn a city into a very efficient hub, and cities across the world have proven that over and over again. Rail transportation in general, be that short, medium or long-range, has not yet seen any viable alternative, and whenever we pumped enough money into research and development to improve on it, we did.

While some might argue that electric lines for trolley-buses are unsightly, that’s but a small and unnecessarily vocal minority. The general public just wants to get quickly from A to B, safely and comfortably. Miles better than the suggested individual gondolas zooming above our heads everywhere.

We don’t need to revolutionise transit and transportation tech. We have it already. What we need is an innovative and socially responsible look at how to best make use of it.

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.