High Speed Rail Systems or Electric, Automated Vehicles? Why Not Both?

Transportation is always political. The only question is whether it's transparently political. In other words, are groups affected by transportation access and cost, or the environmental impact of various modes (as well as the environmental impacts of building new transportation platforms and corridors) brought to the table? Are we listening to them, or are we listening only to those entities seeking to profit from the transportation needs of others? We also need to know more about the impacts of Covid-induced, and economically induced, at-home work and telecommuting. 

One of the hottest question about the current transportation outlook is whether the mass conversion to electric vehicles and a transition away from individual driver control is going to take the form of traditional mass transit (in this case high-speed rail, or “HRS”), or the continued decentralization of individual vehicles, modified into electric, autonomous (self-driving, “AVs,” “EVs” and “AEVs”) units. 

High speed rail is already here all over the world–Russia, China, most of the European Union, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Its production in the United States has been blocked by politicians in the service of their oil and gas donors, but such resistance can't last forever if HSR truly makes sense. In the meantime, AVs, by which we almost universally mean electrical-powered AVs, should be increasing in numbers for the next several years and one of those years, I think sooner rather than later. The development of a radar chip is key to mass consumer AVs, and that chip is coming soon, as Junko Yoshida wrote last year, sharing an industry prediction that such chips should be in mass production by 2024 or 2025.

The benefits of HSR are overwhelming. It's probably the single greatest possible fix for carbon emissions among all means of transportation, particularly public or mass transit. The need to overcome oil dependency is surely obvious to everyone but oil investors and executives, and if we really could establish a nationwide network of electric trains and tracks that can compete with air travel, we will use a heck of a lot less fossil fuel. High speed rail's impact on reduced oil demand (around 4 million barrels per day) and carbon emission reductions (90% less carbon use than other methods) may be easier to measure than that of individual vehicles, but electric cars will undoubtedly decrease overall emissions over time as well. This is true even if the "start-up" costs of building EVs and AEVs include greater carbon emissions, or if the continued generation of electricity also comes partly from fossil fuels. 

Electronic and autonomous vehicles will completely eliminate fossil fuel use in the automobiles themselves, and Richard Nunno of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute maintains that even if generating electricity causes pollution, it's on balance far better than fossil fuels. Autonomous vehicles are much lighter than non-autonomous ones because of the necessary safety features. They could be up to 75% lighter than gas and non-autonomous vehicles, which will massively reduce environmental impact. Marketers looking to push these technologies will first look for signals on which consumers are likely to use “green” products, using data such as Accurate Append’s “Green Score” or even a companion “Wealth Score” to find those deep-pocketed early adopters. 

We know HSR will reduce individual drivers on the road, which will decrease density and the propensity for accidents. On the other hand, autonomous vehicles promise to virtually eliminate auto accidents. Some of the speculative data on AVs is mind-numbing, like the idea that "self-driving cars could decrease accident fatalities by as much as 90 percent." I haven't seen the data or methodology, but I wonder what level of systemic reliability and security can be guaranteed–will entities be able to hack into them (and for that matter could HSRs be hacked)? 

There are short-term environmental costs to producing and deploying both. Some of them are insidious and less well-known, like the impact of mining rare metals. Our current tight labor market in construction and technology may also make high speed rail difficult to crank up. But increases in automation should eliminate some jobs and thus open a market for HSR and E/AV jobs. Scientists are also exploring alternatives to the rare-earth metal mining that is necessary to get electric vehicles (car or train or whatever) to work.

Are the two mutually exclusive? Libertarians are pretending this is the case. Marc Joffe of the Reason Foundation forebodingly wrote in 2019: "By the time the first bullet train pulls out of San Jose’s Diridon Station it may well displace more electric vehicle trips than trips by cars relying on fossil fuels.  If our electricity comes from renewable sources by then, high-speed rail would be replacing car trips that don’t produce greenhouse-gas emissions." But this is silly, as Roger Rudick at StreetblogSF pointed out in response: recognizing E/AVs' many virtues, it's nonetheless true that "whatever’s under the hood, cars always use many multiples more energy to move the same number of passengers."

But why not both? In the past few years, we've learned a new term: microtransit, which is "demand-responsive" system of buses and smaller vehicles, with flexible scheduling based on community member needs. So let's build better mass transit (including HSR) where it makes most sense, which is in areas of denser population and low-impact pass-through access. In rural communities, and urban neighborhoods, smaller transit vehicles or shared electrical or autonomous-electrical vehicles might be added to community and neighborhood car-sharing plans. 

In order to figure this all out, cities and counties need to survey and collect and regularly update data–demographic, attitudinal, even political. We need to know where people live and work, and what they truly need. 

So what can we take away from this? That building just and sustainable transportation in the United States will require joint public and private projects geared toward mass- and micro-transit. We can also surmise that a profit-only metric is wrong, not just because it's immoral to only consider profits, but also because transit has external benefits that strengthen the economy, and workers' economic security, in other ways. In the meantime, for fans of high speed rail, APTA has prepared a good debating guide. Do your homework and research, because this comparison between sustainable cars and sustainable trains is likely to go on until both are fully deployed. 

Photo via UKDOT

What [Not What] Is [Not Is] Quantum Poetry?

Like the Hegelian Dialectic, quantum physics does justice to the reality of in-betweens, the construction of reality by its participants, the limits and incompleteness of binarism, the wholism that comes from living in multiple worlds with fuzzy lines. As Peter Thompson, the Director of the Centre for Enrst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield writes, "The Real is not an inaccessible pre-existing Real, but rather is the product of the ongoing process of its own realisation."

In the midst of uncertainty comes strings of contingent events that pop out from quantum processes. This allows for things that seem mind-blowing to those of us still trapped in a Newtonian, Aristotelian, either/or mindset: Things can travel backwards or forwards in time. Things can be in more than one place at once. Sometimes it seems like the state of matter some thing is in (like light) is a result, not just a feature, of how we look at it. This is all covered with, occurs within, language. As Thompson puts it, "[w]hen quantum physicists try to explain the collapse of the wave function, they resort again and again to the metaphor of language: this collapse occurs when a quantum event 'leaves a trace' in the observation apparatus, when it is 'registered' in some way. Reality, among other things, is in the quantum universe a series of statements, inscriptions, declarations. 

We know the oft-repeated examples of this: "a quantum object arriving at a fork in its path does not have to choose between veering left or right but travels both routes simultaneously instead—an action that is impossible for classical objects, like baseballs and humans." The problem is precisely putting into language what, in its composition, is itself so similar to language. How can we describe quantum reality when our language is underwritten by classical reality? One person with an answer to that question, or at least a proposal, is poet Amy Catanzano, whose poem “World Lines: A Quantum Supercomputer Poem” incorporates the physics of a quantum computer.

Catanzano writes her quantum poem to reflect the intersecting lines of alternate realities and loops, so that several words function as connectors for more than one sentence and several sentences are tied together fluidly. You need to see the photos of how her poetry is inscribed as part of a computer program; just reading the textual lines here won't do it justice. So look here and here. In the meantime, the lines are memorable even if they are not part of an actual quantum entanglement:

When we think as far as our world lines, our thoughts become movements,

in space, motions, time, threads curved as thoughts recording the mind writing relative, 

tangled motions, knotting intricate paths like strands of DNA intertwined.

The mind of a knot is a continuous curve through space, writing woven,

locations of particles traveling as their orbits in spacetime knot particles,

of indefinite location. The world mind is a record that orbits its knotted history.

The poem, an indefinite knot threaded in a continuous curve of mind's space,

computes qubits, its world lines the braided motions of mind's memory. 

The funny thing, of course, is that there's nothing completely new (or completely old or fixed) under the sun. Many poetic traditions, such as the German Romantics immediately below, are "quantum" in that they talk about how everything is connected together, including what is and what is not, and how even the most simple lines are complex journeys. From Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, written in 1790, we read: 

In truth the subtle web of thought 

Is like the weaver’s fabric wrought: 

One treadle moves a thousand lines, 

Swift dart the shuttles to and fro, 

Unseen the threads together flow, 

A thousand knots one stroke combines.

And from Goethe's contemporary Friedrich Holderlin, in his 1803 poem "Mnemosyne":

The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,

Cooked and sampled on earth. And there's a law,

That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,

Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.

And there is much that needs to be retained,

Like a load of wood on the shoulders.

But the pathways are dangerous.

The captured elements and ancient laws of earth

Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning

For all that is unconfined. But much needs

To be retained. And loyalty is required.

Yet we mustn't look forwards or backwards.

We should let ourselves be cradled

As if on a boat rocking on a lake.

The message? Thompson again: "Not everything that has happened had to happen, but now that it has it did. There is no reason for it, no Telos towards which it is heading, only a Telos of the finite moment in which we exist and from which we can look back." As a breaker of genre boundaries, Catanzano writes, quantum poetics thins the boundaries between literary and scientific, creative and critical, descriptive and normative. 

In technology, particularly AI, encryption, and other computer tech, quantum physics is the gateway to being able to synthesize and analyze massive amounts of data at speeds that once would have seemed miraculous, because it turns out that binaries slow us down. A lot of technologies such as phone appending may feel instantaneous to us but across the distance of space, we will appreciate the ability to move through data at quantum speeds. Philosophically, though, and lyrically, quantum thinking also speeds us up--it speeds up the transitions our brains make from classical binaristic or raw empirical thinking into a consciousness that acknowledges ambiguities and interconnectivity as parts of our ever-changing, never complete realities.

For Space Debris, the Most Likely and Worst Case Scenarios Are the Same

 

We've witnessed the impact of dumping garbage into the ocean. Carelessly disposed waste clogs up major sea lanes, depletes ocean resources and, in general, problematizes commercial and noncommercial activity at sea. Though each of these impacts has a different time scale, they all fall disproportionately on those who are least equipped to deal with them.


The effects of "garbage," or debris, in outer space aren't quite the same, but they do ultimately threaten the safety, and the very possibility, of space activity. As Spencer Roberts, a space writer for The Wire and Jacobin, puts it, we have littered orbital space with trash. According to the DOD, there are over 27,000 pieces of debris in the tiny part of our post-mesosphere bubble optimal for orbit. Once any of those objects collide, thousands of additional pieces are generated – some very small (particles really) – but their kinetic energy can be wickedly damaging to intact spacecraft or satellites in their paths. Writing for Earth.org, Charlotte Luke cited estimates that half of such debris stays in orbit for a century – and points out that the debris that falls can pose additional potential hazards. Luke adds that over the next 200 years, "debris larger than 20 cm across will multiply" by 150%, but smaller debris will multiply much much faster.


This area, "low Earth orbit," is a little over 2000 km up and, as mentioned, narrow in terms of the space that satellites and other near-earth vehicles have to traverse. Because of that, there is a constant danger of debris hitting not only other debris, but all the stuff that isn't yet debris. Luke points out that the International Space Station has had to perform more than 25 "debris collision avoidance maneuvers" since 1999. And since the ISS carries humans and other life, it's not just pieces of tech hitting other pieces of tech. The humanitarian disaster resulting from the collision of a dangerous piece of space debris with a manned spacecraft would also be disastrous for spaceflight, its impact possibly greater than even that of the awful space shuttle disasters.


Although some writers dismiss the planetary impact of falling space debris, maintaining that the majority of it burns up in the atmosphere, there are many reasons to be concerned with the environmental and public health effects of debris that re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. Luke writes:


debris from Russian Proton rockets, launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, litters the Altai region of eastern Siberia. This includes debris from old fuel tanks containing highly toxic fuel residue, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH), a carcinogen which is harmful to plants and animals. While efforts are made to contain fallout from launches within a specified area, it is extremely difficult to achieve completely . . . [in Russia] in 2007, 27 people were hospitalised in the Ust-Kansky District of Altai with cancer-related complications, many of them citing the rocket fuel as the suspected cause.



Many experts say we're nearing disaster conditions. A couple of years ago, European Space Agency officials warned that collision avoidance maneuvers were increasing for all kinds of ESA vehicles. Fittingly, the incident most cited in 2019 was one where an ESA satellite (a public entity) had to dodge a small Space-X internet provider satellite-craft. This kind of incident is going to become more and more common with the fleets of communication satellites that are filling our skies.


What eventually happens is the much-feared "Kessler syndrome," essentially "a cascading effect of collisions, and feedback collisions" and which means that even if we stopped launching things now (unlikely), the effects will continue for centuries, similar to the way carbon in the atmosphere will continue to hasten climate change long past a post-carbon transition. We're at a tipping point on space debris now, and there's no real international coordination, authority or agreement to force private operators to retrieve their debris. And just in case we think that eliminating debris is going to be easy, "destroying objects in orbit is not an option as it would simply generate smaller debris." Retrieval means actual retrieval, and it's difficult to imagine that this will be easy, although it does present entrepreneurs with another opportunity to make money from the folly of their industry. But even retrieval begs another question: what happens once debris is removed from space? Where will it go?


What can we do about this situation? Failure is not an option. After all, communications technology, like that facilitated by orbiting satellites, is important. Furthermore, space development is inevitable and, if we can limit the externalities, beneficial for humanity. Space debris is a true "tragedy of the commons" mostly because space entrepreneurs and private corporations' first inclination is to find ways to sweep their negative externalities under the rug, hoping someone else will do a more comprehensive cleaning in the future. That's the nature of short-term profits and the bottom line. But the problem, of course, is that eventually nobody will be able to make any of those profits, and we won't be able to use space for nonprofit reasons either.


The problem, as space consultant George Zarkadakis discussed earlier this year, is that the amount of debris is increasing at a rate near-exponential. "A recent European conference in space debris has warned that space junk in orbit could increase 50 times by the end of the century." For Zarkadakis, a critic of excessive privatization, the solution must begin with holding private companies accountable, making sure that there is tracking, compliance, proactive planning, both external and internal regulation. The current expectation is that private space companies have an "Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) agenda" agenda to make these regulations explicit. Such protocols need to be mandatory.


You can think of regulations as closing the gaps between what’s presently being done and the potential for widespread benefit. Just as a company like Accurate Append might fill data gaps to facilitate the mutually beneficial relationships between companies, organizations and campaigns on one hand and clients, supporters and donors on the other, regulations help to bridge the gaps between personal gain and public benefit to the advantage of all.


Ultimately, private companies should welcome such regulations. They make their industry more predictable and give firms clear thresholds and standards above which developers will know they are "in the clear" or their liability at least somewhat limited. Scientists should welcome the regulations because it means greater harmony between private and public space projects. Governments should welcome the opportunity to create and enforce them to prove that international management of space resources is possible and desirable.