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A thought on future of transportation

If you are a student of business history, of the many stark revelations one would realize, one of them would be the coming revolution in transportation industry.

One way of imagining this change is to look at it from the perspective of where we are and to where we are moving. We are moving away from oil-based transport to energy based transport. We are moving away from public transport to private transport. We are moving from short hops to long hops. Add a fizz of technology exponentiation and we have a Star Wars fiction coming true.

The point of the post is not to contest the coming of the revolution or make any pointers as to where it could lead or what could lead this change. The point is a more fundamental question: Do we need transportation?

To ask this blasphemical question is like asking do we need food. But yes, we have lived through thousands of years of progress without much transportation and next-to-nil communication, why do we have to still follow the same model.

In good olden days, transportation and communication were obverse and reverse of the same coin. You had transportation because the communication technologies were weak. You had to develop communication technologies because transportation was slow. Hence, it is obvious there is a complementary relationship between these two.

So, coming to the question, why do we need transportation, even after we have massive improvements in communication technology? Transportation is a pleasant experience when bitten by wanderlust bug but in cases where communication can take over the tasks, it becomes irrelevant.

Perhaps, it is the subconscious desire to be at all places at once that makes the quicker and niftier transportation a status symbol. An exclusive realm of jet-set. Once trend driven by creamy layer of the society, it penetrates all the sections of the society. But is it possible to be at all places at the same time? Is it necessary to be at all places at the same time? Is it necessary to be at all places at the same time ... physically?

The answer is clearly no. You cannot kill the distance in a physical world. At least as long as human body is influenced by the same physics that creates these distances. But you can certainly work around these limitations by creating a communication channel that will help you be at all places that you want at the same time, the only compromise being its not physical. But has the equivalent effect.

Perhaps it makes more sense for us to pursue communication advancements than transportation problems.

More esoterically, we can ask, do we really need to communicate to everybody, at all places, at the same time? How many situations demand such a necessity?

Aside:

Just because I came across it:

It was estimated by a California's transportation agency that Americans spent 3.5 billion hours in traffic jams in the year 2000. Add to the increase in congestion since then, let us assume the number would have increased to 4.5 billion.

Now factor in the very mediocre infrastructure, comparatively huge population and dense compact cities; the similar estimate in India would be staggering. Even with a productivity of a dollar an hour, that is enough investment to solve all our infrastructural problems!

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