End of the Road

Is Boyz II Men's greatest song actually a chilling vision of the future?

How we’ll move around in the future! Or maybe not.

In the year(ish) run of this newsletter there may be no topic I’ve written about more than transportation. I’ve written about electric vehicles and electric planes and autonomous vehicles and rideshare and Segways and those damned scooters. Two weeks ago, I turned a post about cities into one about transportation. The one time I wrote about sports it was the sport that uses cars. Even more than nostalgic 80s and 90s references, there is nothing I return to more than transportation.

And not without cause. The history of humanity is intimately tied in with the history of how we move humans. For most of our history this was done with our legs before we made two great technological advances. We began moving humans by the power of water and then by the power of animals. These were prerequisites for civilization. They gave birth to cities and trade and communications and exploration that led to us settling almost the entirety of the land. Technological leaps like sails and wheels made these technologies better, but, for a few dozen millennia, this is what we had.

Then we suddenly started revolutionizing this field constantly. We created railroads and steamships and the eternal combustion engine and motor vehicles and finally safe and speedy air travel. Moving things and people at great speeds over long distances became so easy it shaped our modern world. So, with that exciting preamble, what types of big ideas are we looking at now to shape the world of tomorrow?

Well, there’s electric vehicles (EVs). Although the electric vehicle market is not a panacea and still has problems, people thinking it was a gimmick or novelty are looking quite wrong. The best automaker in the world is dropping $700 million to retool their plants in Ohio for EV production. You can see a solar powered EV on tour in a city near you. You can spend stupid amounts of money on an ultra-luxury EV from your choice of Cadillac or Rolls Royce. The list of EV SUVs and trucks has gotten so long it’s not worth my time linking them. The electric truck and van markets are growing, as are electric school busses and even, perhaps someday, electric planes. And if you don’t find any of that electrifying, BMW would like to know if you’re interested in all that but powered by hydrogen?

Despite some recent bad press autonomous vehicles continue to roll toward reality. Without rehashing previous pieces, there’s been enough overhyping of autonomous vehicles that they already seem like a disappointment, which, combined with their novelty, works to hide their progress. But there is a lot of progress here. Autonomous vehicles are already on the roads, both here and in Europe. And although Status Quoists may scoff that these vehicles are not able to immediately replace all functions of current vehicles, anyone familiar with the origins of any mode of transportation know that it involves a lot of oddities and tragedies until they begin working right. Even if the near future is only long-haul trucking and bus replacement, this is still a major advance.

Finally, there’s the big one, the one that everyone complains about not having: flying cars. Are they coming?

Okay, maybe that’s not it. For starters, that’s not a car, it’s a bike. Secondly, it’s not exactly setting speed or longevity records. The Jetsons this is not. For that you would need Jetson One.

That’s a bit cooler. And there are people and industries who believe in this eVTOL technology. But despite heavy investment, there’s many challenges that are perhaps insurmountable. At the end of the day, we’re still numerous other advances from this becoming commonplace, including leaps in battery power and automation. Because if you think people are bad at driving, imagine how bad they’ll be at piloting while looking at their phone. This may be real enough people will finally shut up about not getting them, but if it’s just a novelty, that’s not a big idea.

In fact, now that we’ve written all this out, none of these seem like big ideas at all. But this is Big Ideas month! All the electric (and hydrogen) vehicles aren’t big ideas for transportation. They’re big ideas for fighting climate change. I may support that, but it’s not going to change how we live the way domesticating the horse did.

The same goes for automation. Autonomous vehicles will likely have two big effects. The first being safety. Despite recent outrageous but well shared claims to the contrary,¹ humans driving is dangerous. Last year alone, 42,915 Americans were killed on the roads. To help with perspective, 47,434 American soldiers died in combat during the entire Vietnam War. If we had an equivalent crash to the 1996 ValuJet crash every single day it would still be less deaths. If we can create autonomous vehicles that are even 50% safer than humans – far from guaranteed but also far from the hopes of what is possible – that is the equivalent of wiping out leukemia or brain cancer. This would be a fantastic benefit for society.

Of course, the other big effect is potentially wiping out millions of well-paying jobs for people without advanced degrees, which, well, doesn’t seem great. But either way, those are seismic shifts in safety and the economy. They don’t change how we get around. People and goods are still going to be moved on the same roads at the same speeds in the same manner, they just won’t have anyone at the wheel. Again, big ideas, but not the ones we’re hunting.

And flying cars? We have them, they’re called helicopters. And there’s very little about mass consumption helicopters that is likely to change the way that we live.

With all that in mind, it makes me ask – and get ready because I love this joke so much, I made it the title – have we reached the end of the road?²

A large amount of this newsletter involves me dancing around the Great Stagnation. I dance around it is because despite devoting lots of time to thinking about it, I still have no idea what I want to say. And that’s not going to change today. But perhaps more than any other piece I’ve written this one reminds me of my favorite fact that explains society (one I am certain I’ve used here before). If you go to the Smithsonian – which I highly recommend! – you can see the Wright Flyer and Apollo 11. It took humanity its entire existence to get to the point of powered flight. A scant 66 years later we were on the moon. This is an astounding fact that you probably don’t spend enough time thinking about. The pace of innovation in the period in which our lifetimes just so happen to fall is astonishing by the standards of human history. But is the party over? Are we returning to the norm of human history, which is a fragmented ebbing and flowing of progress?

Maybe. It’s foolish to say that we’re entirely out of big ideas. Next week I’m going to be talking about maybe the biggest of all ideas. Yet, we may be out of big ideas in some areas. The last two hundred years have seen us make such dramatic leaps in transportation that there may be nothing real left.

It’s possible that we’ll improve one of our existing ways to such a degree that a phase transition could occur. Namely, with train type technologies. Be it maglev, hyperloop, or this wacky Canadian train that is supposed to go 600 MPH, perhaps one of these will manage to become such a leap that it will change how we live. If wacky Canadian FluxJet is real, perhaps instead of people making the hour-long rush hour commute from Austin to Taylor, they’ll commute to Wichita! Of course, things never quite work out like that in practice.³ Likely these would just be used to allow a greater amount of sprawl.

There’s four other Big Ideas I can think of in transportation. The first is micromobility. And I don’t mean those damned scooters which, in a potential sign that God loves us, are already seeing problems. Instead, I’m talking about this:

If humans had the ability to individually fly, that would change things. The problem is that we require a lot of force to get off the ground and fly, which requires a lot of fuel. And there’s the “having a rocket strapped to your back” element. Perhaps if one of the theoretical Impossible Drives were real this could work, but for now, it looks more likely to be a gimmick for thrill seekers and tourists. In other words, the new Segway. A more horrific fate for any technology I cannot imagine.

Another big idea would be some form of space travel both inexpensive and reliable enough that large numbers of people would be able to leave the planet. If humans were regularly traveling towards space stations, lunar colonies, and perhaps even Mars or asteroids, that would truly change how we live.⁴ Likewise, interstellar travel would be big. And while we’re just throwing Star Trek at this, teleportation. But those are so far within the realm of science fiction that although they are not impossible, they may as well be. Our descendants may someday crack those codes, but we most certainly shall not. With that as the roster of big ideas, do we really have anywhere left to go?

At the risk of Fukuyamaing myself, no, I think we may be at an end of history here. Not for all time, but at least for our time. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. From the time that humans first realized they could cook with fire to the inevitable future of eating foods that are created and not grown, we’re looking at a massive stretch of time where everything was just futzing around. But that futzing was amazing. It gave us sandwiches, forks and knives, barbecue, and the greatest human invention of them all, pizza. Just because we’re limited to things like improving safety or speed or the ability to watch YouTube videos while driving doesn’t mean that the progress we’re going to see in transportation won’t be beneficial. It just won’t fundamentally change anything. When it comes to moving around, we really may be at the end of the road. At least, until we reach a point that where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

1. If you’re unaware, this and an earlier comment are in relation to a dreadful Bloomberg News piece on self-driving cars that was widely shared on the internet. Although I often link pieces that disagree with me, I won’t link a piece that poorly written, but for these purposes, just know he claims that we’re actually really great at driving and it’s totally safe! All it takes is sociopathically measuring it by average miles traveled. So much “journalism” is just so bafflingly bad these days.

2. Get it? Because we use ROADS to TRANSPORT things, and this is about transportation. Does it astound you that you get to read this for free?

3. Basically, the problem with any train travel is that no matter how fast it is you still need to get to the station, board, wait for it to leave, then it will either go to one destination – minimizing its usefulness – or multiple destinations – minimizing its speed, then get from the station to home. All of this adds time and expense, not to mention the expense of the train itself, which, unless heavily subsidized, will be significant. Signed, a former train commuter.

4. I’ve been working for about six months on a series about humans and space travel which I am nowhere close to finishing. The super condensed version is that this still seems a lot more like science fiction than science fact.