Science & Technology News

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

In the countryside there might still be some need for private cars, but fewer and fewer people will live there, as cities become dramatically more attractive.

COVID has opened many eyes to the practicality of working from home, so around here (Toronto), there's been a flight from the city core. Many condos have lost close to 10% of their value, rents have sunk up to 20%; commercial real estate sits empty... The core will undoubtedly be repopulated with the young and immigrants, but it's hard to imagine that self-driving cars will be affordable to them, compared to mass transit.

Self-driving cars are truly revolutionary because they provide even better human-time efficiency than private cars, taking you directly from to directly to, with no parking involved, and at much higher speeds and without traffic jams.

Self-driving cars will instantly eliminate city buses (and city planners know this) -- they will be completely obsolete, extinct. But trams and metro might also disappear with time.

Most of us CFers will not live to see this realized.

Self-driving cars are the biggest revolution in transport since -- well, even bigger than the car. Since the Indo-Europeans domesticated horses.

I'll ask again - Are there any examples of a city that has made public a comprehensive plan for adapting their core to the sort of self-driving car utopia you're describing? I haven't seen anything like that, and without supporting infrastructure, self-driving cars won't deliver all the advantages you're trumpeting.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by geoleo

Flying cars are supposed to be in your garage at home or hey are not "cars".

Research what a private airpark community is and you will see that the aircraft ( flying cars do come under the definition) hangar is the homes garage.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

COVID has opened many eyes to the practicality of working from home, so around here (Toronto), there's been a flight from the city core. Many condos have lost close to 10% of their value, rents have sunk up to 20%; commercial real estate sits empty...

There will be permanents changes to retail real estate, but in Europe central city residential real estate has had one of its best years ever. In any case, don't confuse short term with long term effects. By and large, this pandemic is a little blip compared to really big trends like urbanization.

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

. . .The core will undoubtedly be repopulated with the young and immigrants, but it's hard to imagine that self-driving cars will be affordable to them, compared to mass transit.

Self driving cars will be significantly cheaper than taxis and will be roughly comparable in cost to mass transit. You must have missed the part in my post where I explained, with references, why that will be the case. You're not grasping the essence of how this works and why it will be revoluationary.

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Most of us CFers will not live to see this realized.
I'll ask again - Are there any examples of a city that has made public a comprehensive plan for adapting their core to the sort of self-driving car utopia you're describing? I haven't seen anything like that, and without supporting infrastructure, self-driving cars won't deliver all the advantages you're trumpeting.

And I will answer again -- all major cities in Europe, and certainly most U.S. cities. Don't know about other countries, but this will be so explosive that laggers won't lag for long, when they see the benefits being reaped by other cities.


I have projects in Helsinki which require major city planning decisions by the municipal government, and I've seen with my own eyes the planning work which is going on. I am required to prove that my buildings are well adapted to the end of private cars, and I'm required to show that parking -- which will disappear like horse and buggy -- is designed to be used for something else when it's no longer needed.


Some reading:



https://www.washingtonpost.com/trans...-century-auto/


An excellent article about what Manhattan will look like without private cars: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/o...an-cities.html. This shows off the plan commissioned by the municipal government for guidance of the new car-free urban plan for Manhattan.



U.S. is a bit behind Europe. Here's a good overview of what's going on in Europe, where concrete planning for the banning of non-autonomous vehicles from city centers is being planned all over the continent:


https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...66046218304307


Here is a very good scientific paper about the radical effect of autonomous vehicles on traffic flows and road throughput capacity, with the hard math behind it: https://www.researchgate.net/publica...les_on_Traffic. This is one of the sources of my earlier statements. There is also a good discussion of required infrastructure.

[newhaul]

And one good x class flare hitting the planet and all of that technology will be scrap metal.
Lets hope it doesnt happen soon.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

There will be permanents changes to retail real estate, but in Europe central city residential real estate has had one of its best years ever. In any case, don't confuse short term with long term effects. By and large, this pandemic is a little blip compared to really big trends like urbanization.

In my very limited experience, Europe has made more "livable" big cities than car-centric North America, so there's a head start there, even without self-driving cars. It will be interesting to watch what happens in N American cities in the next 10 years.

Self driving cars will be significantly cheaper than taxis and will be roughly comparable in cost to mass transit. You must have missed the part in my post where I explained, with references, why that will be the case. You're not grasping the essence of how this works and why it will be revoluationary.

I understand the potential; I'm looking for concrete (heh) evidence that cities are planning and executing to realize this potential, and not just oooohing and aaahing over the AV brochures and futurists' prose.

And I will answer again -- all major cities in Europe, and certainly most U.S. cities. Don't know about other countries, but this will be so explosive that laggers won't lag for long, when they see the benefits being reaped by other cities.

... and again... plans! links! budgets! where are they?

Some reading:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/trans...-century-auto/

An excellent article about what Manhattan will look like without private cars: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/o...an-cities.html. This shows off the plan commissioned by the municipal government for guidance of the new car-free urban plan for Manhattan.

U.S. is a bit [or a lot ] behind Europe. Here's a good overview of what's going on in Europe, where concrete planning for the banning of non-autonomous vehicles from city centers is being planned all over the continent:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...66046218304307

Here is a very good scientific paper about the radical effect of autonomous vehicles on traffic flows and road throughput capacity, with the hard math behind it: https://www.researchgate.net/publica...les_on_Traffic. This is one of the sources of my earlier statements. There is also a good discussion of required infrastructure.

Thanks. I will look at those carefully, where I can. The sciencedirect link is paywalled off.

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Research does not so far show that a global supergrid brings any large advantages:


https://www.iaee.org/eeep/eeepexec/E...er_ExecSum.pdf


See commentary: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.co...al-supergrids/


Very long distance transmission of bulk power is expensive and lossy, whether or not you use DC.



The authors of this paper think that high density energy carriers may be a better way to do it. I have commented before that hydrogen fueled vehicles go together very well with wind power used the produce the hydrogen. The hydrogen electrolyzer doesn't care much about the variability of wind power, although of course the process is less efficient when capacity utilization of the electrolyzer is low. But excess wind power can be stored as hydrogen, so that's the only serious drawback from the variability of wind power, and the capital costs of wind power are so much lower than other forms of energy that you still come out ahead.



Hydrogen from nuclear is somewhat better because better capacity utilization of the electrolyzers. See: https://www.iaee.org/eeep/eeepexec/E...er_ExecSum.pdf. Hydrogen can also be produced directly by a nuclear reactor, without electrolysis. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...28139752000041. But more efficient use of the electrolyzers doesn't make up for the higher capital cost of nuclear plants, so wind-plus-hydrogen is definitely a winning combination.

Would you amplify why you think hydrogen is so useful?

It does not seem to be a good fit for the transportation industry because of low energy density (leaks easily due to small molecule, and low energy density unless highly compressed or deeply cooled -- which makes using it difficult and dangerous). The auto industry seems to be casting its lot with battery power.

Using hydrogen for bulk energy transfer seems expensive because there is no existing infrastructure to build on. Electrical generation already has its high-power transmission lines, though they will have to be expanded. I doubt that natural gas pipelines can handle hydrogen -- and we will need our NG pipelines for a while anyway.

I suppose if there is a way to economically store hydrogen near its point of generation, then you could use it there to run electrical generators when the primary source of energy is off-line. Exactly how do you envision storing large quantities of hydrogen?

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by GordMay

“A Habitable-zone Earth-sized Planet Rescued from False Positive Status” ~ by Andrew Vanderburg et al.
About 300 light-years from Earth, lies a planet, Kepler-1649c, that is unlike any other ever discovered: one that is similar to our home, both in terms of size, and temperature, and that lies within its host star's habitable zone.
NASA's Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009, with the sole purpose of searching for planets orbiting other stars. The telescope went out of service in 2018, after experiencing multiple issues. However, before it was decommissioned, it had found thousands of confirmed exoplanets. A team of astronomers are going manually through the data (rejected by Robovetter, a search algorithm), and that's how they found Kepler-1649c.

More ➥ https://iopscience.iop.org/article/1...41-8213/ab84e5

And ➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/e...zone-1.5536651

So there is hope that we are not alone??

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by geoleo

So there is hope that we are not alone??

"Hope" springs eternally?

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

....
Some reading:


https://www.washingtonpost.com/trans...-century-auto/


An excellent article about what Manhattan will look like without private cars: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/o...an-cities.html. This shows off the plan commissioned by the municipal government for guidance of the new car-free urban plan for Manhattan.....

From the Washington Post article:

....But some say driverless vehicles could also worsen those problems, particularly if they’re priced affordably enough to make them wildly popular and encourage solo driving. Another concern is the potential for what some planners have dubbed “sprawl on steroids.” A two-hour commute becomes less onerous if travelers can nap, watch a movie or hold a business meeting rather than fume behind the wheel.

Some also worry that driverless vehicles could undermine years of work to curb traffic-inducing sprawl by focusing development on transit. People who can catch a ride door-to-door might not want to walk to or wait for buses and trains, let alone pay premium rents to live or work near subway stations....

When the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education recently modeled how the Washington-Baltimore region might grow, researchers cited residents’ use of autonomous vehicles as a key force.

Self-driving vehicles, they found, would cause residents to take more trips, use transit less and live farther out. Many of the additional trips, researchers said, would come from those who can’t drive, particularly children, the elderly and people with disabilities.

Whether that additional travel results in more traffic congestion, researchers have found, will depend heavily on how much residents share cars and how much road space is freed up from vehicles traveling closer together.

“People are speculating and running models, but no one knows how cheap autonomous vehicles will become and whether people will choose to reduce private ownership to some degree or be willing to share a vehicle,” said Uri Avin, a research professor at the center. “Everyone is guessing about future behavior and costs.”....

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by SailOar

Would you amplify why you think hydrogen is so useful?

It does not seem to be a good fit for the transportation industry because of low energy density (leaks easily due to small molecule, and low energy density unless highly compressed or deeply cooled -- which makes using it difficult and dangerous). The auto industry seems to be casting its lot with battery power.

Using hydrogen for bulk energy transfer seems expensive because there is no existing infrastructure to build on. Electrical generation already has its high-power transmission lines, though they will have to be expanded. I doubt that natural gas pipelines can handle hydrogen -- and we will need our NG pipelines for a while anyway.

I suppose if there is a way to economically store hydrogen near its point of generation, then you could use it there to run electrical generators when the primary source of energy is off-line. Exactly how do you envision storing large quantities of hydrogen?

Well, hydrogen has the highest power density (by mass) of any chemical (i.e. non nuclear) energy carrier. Many orders of magnitude greater than electric batteries. Hydrogen is somewhat difficult to store but still makes a practical fuel. The Russians built a hydrogen-powered Tupolev 154 in the 80's which performed perfectly over 100 flights. Hydrogen powered cars work fine; BMW was producing them already in the 90's. There is a considerable body of opinion that hydrogen cars make more sense than electric ones; see: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/art...probably-both/


Hydrogen is a perfect fuel for ships, too. I often sail on a very large (Tallink Megastar, 50 000 grt) ferry powered by liquified natural gas. Hydrogen is just a baby step away from that.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

. . .Thanks. I will look at those carefully, where I can. The sciencedirect link is paywalled off.

I spend a fair amount of money on Researchgate and various other portals for access to real scientific literature.


If one thinks one is entitled to an opinion on subjects touching on science, I think it ill becomes one to refuse to invest in access to the actual literature.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

I spend a fair amount of money on Researchgate and various other portals for access to real scientific literature.

If one thinks one is entitled to an opinion on subjects touching on science, I think it ill becomes one to refuse to invest in access to the actual literature.

So, looking at the links:

WaPo

• fairly speculative, short on specifics
• "experts say...", "other experts warn..."
• confirms that the widespread adoption will take at least 20 to 30 years (I predict longer, especially for larger cities)
• NO specifics about how high-speed tightly-spaced self-driving traffic is going to peacefully coexist with pedestrian, bike and transit traffic

Researchgate

• a theoretical assessment of traffic with/without autonomous vehicles
• unsurprisingly, predicts an increase in vehicle throughput with all-autonomous vehicles (+40%)
• refers to pedestrians and cyclists mainly as impediments to max efficiency
• no mention of special lanes or other provisions for high-speed traffic.

The Science Direct link that's paywalled: Self-driving cars and the city: Effects on sprawl, energy consumption, and housing affordability - I'm sure it's also interesting, but I'd bet it's also mainly theoretical/speculative and short on prescriptions or suggested urban adaptations. Hardly worth the investment to read, in this case. Pass.

I've read many of these or similar before, and I have little doubt that there will be efficiencies and safety improvements from the adoption of self-driving cars... but as of yet I've seen very little by way of actual proposed urban changes beyond "we'll need less parking, yay!". And about nothing re how increased vehicle efficiency AND a kinder, gentler pedestrian/cyclist-oriented streetscape can be achieved simultaneously.

It's funny looking at the before/after images in the WaPo article, like this one:



...cos we have been doing exactly that sort of lane reasignment for a while now, in several parts of Toronto. A better, more efficient, more livable area. Without automated cars. Good urban design is good urban design, period, no technical saviour required.

So, from my vantage point, the first real widespread application of self-driving vehicles will be as Uber-replacements. There won't be any significant effects on urban traffic til there's many of these on the road, and this will provide the learning and experience that will show to what extent the Tom Swift stuff you've mentioned is actually feasible.

[Pelagic]

I am enjoying following this discussion, as solutions arise to mitigate the harmful byproducts of our needs.

I started a more cruising boat based thread on brain storming what evolutionary changes in design and use might happen due to increased weather challengies etc...
Looking 50 years ahead.

It would be great if those with deep readings on leading edge science and technology could chime in.
https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...d.php?t=247318

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Well, hydrogen has the highest power density (by mass) of any chemical (i.e. non nuclear) energy carrier. Many orders of magnitude greater than electric batteries.

But low power density by volume, unless under very high pressure or very low temperatures. Which informed my question. I've not followed the technology, and so hoped you had more information to fill in.

Hydrogen is somewhat difficult to store but still makes a practical fuel. The Russians built a hydrogen-powered Tupolev 154 in the 80's which performed perfectly over 100 flights. Hydrogen powered cars work fine; BMW was producing them already in the 90's. There is a considerable body of opinion that hydrogen cars make more sense than electric ones; see: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/art...probably-both/

This article is long on hype and short on specifics. However, I appreciate all the time you've spent discussing on this thread, and would understand if you don't have the time to further educate us.

For comparison, natural gas liquefies at atmospheric pressure at -160C.
Hydrogen liquefies at -253C.

Or you can compress hydrogen to ~10,000psi, and a 30 gallon tank (holding ~11 pounds hydrogen) will provide a fuel-cell powered vehicle with enough energy for ~300 miles.

This all sounds way more complex to me than diesel or batteries, but maybe it's just because it is unfamiliar to me.

Hydrogen is a perfect fuel for ships, too. I often sail on a very large (Tallink Megastar, 50 000 grt) ferry powered by liquified natural gas. Hydrogen is just a baby step away from that.

I'm aware of a few LNG-powered ships. What is unclear to me is what the range of LNG ships are, compared to a similar bunker-fueled ship? I'm guessing that LNG ships have a much more limited range. If so, then a replacement for bunker fuel may not be "just around the corner" for long-haul ships, even as battery-powered semis are not yet the answer for long-haul trucking.

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Well, hydrogen has the highest power density (by mass) of any chemical (i.e. non nuclear) energy carrier. Many orders of magnitude greater than electric batteries. Hydrogen is somewhat difficult to store but still makes a practical fuel. The Russians built a hydrogen-powered Tupolev 154 in the 80's which performed perfectly over 100 flights. Hydrogen powered cars work fine; BMW was producing them already in the 90's. There is a considerable body of opinion that hydrogen cars make more sense than electric ones; see: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/art...probably-both/


Hydrogen is a perfect fuel for ships, too. I often sail on a very large (Tallink Megastar, 50 000 grt) ferry powered by liquified natural gas. Hydrogen is just a baby step away from that.

Yes, hydrogen has the best specific energy.
And it has really poor energy density. All the current solutions to the energy density problem involve compromising the specific energy in some way.

For shipping it may still work, probably by liquefying it at a 15% energy penalty. Airbus is looking at hydrogen for airliners but at the cost of half the aircraft’s volume being dedicated to fuel.

Hydrides may be a solution for land vehicles but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Electro fuels such as ammonia, butanol or synthetic petrol or diesel seem seem like better candidates because less of the existing infrastructure needs replacement.

For land use I expect electrified freight trains to become more dominant, with battery/pantograph trucking providing the first and last 100mi for deliveries.