Like Concorde and the Apollo missions to the moon that ended in 1972, modern trains appear to be a dream that faded. Despite our budget surpluses, we are unwilling to invest in infrastructure and railways cost plenty. Yet many of us would be more than willing to sit in the comfort of a TGV that could take us from Melbourne
Future Perfect to Sydney, or Sydney to Brisbane, in four hours-only about one hour longer than the present best estimate of door-to-door trips using air travel. The British Conservatives discovered the promise of better rail travel in 2006, observing that magnetically elevated trains could go at over 500 kph, as they already are doing, experimentally, in Asia. Cut that inter-city link to 50 minutes! In Holland they have the Maglev, part train, part bus- it can switch from ordinary roads to supertracks, run on fuel cells or batteries, and reach speeds of 250 kph.
The Rail Infrastructure Corporation has noted that our spending in 2005 in Australia on such essentials as rail and bridges was $28.5 billion below what it needed to be, and that deft investment in infrastructure would increase Australia ’s productivity by 10 per cent.
What of light trains? Their development in the northern suburbs of Perth appears to have been a howling success. Peter Newman, a professor at Murdoch University and adviser to the Premier of Western Australia, believes commuters will take trains willingly if a) they are faster than cars and b) they come so often that timetables are unnecessary. A UTS study has also found that travellers will opt for public transport if it is convenient, safe and affordable.
What is needed is a revolution based on total costing. Add the fuel, pollution, delays, real-estate costs and trauma, and then consider the option of making buses and trains free. Some studies indicate that the price of tickets covers only their collection. Remember the remarkable cheerfulness and freedom Sydney experienced during the weeks of the Olympic Games? Cars almost invisible, public transport laid on-what could this be like in the long term? Would a short series of experiments of this kind be worth considering? If the petrol price rises and pollution concerns continue, maybe the unthinkable will be tried.
Won’t new fuels come to the rescue? Hydrogen, cars running on water, even solar cars (which manage to glide regularly from Darwin to Adelaide)!
Hydrogen is a real prospect, but distant. It’s an expensive way to produce and distribute energy. A hydrogen economy may not emerge generally until well after 2027. Its contribution by then will be substantial, however, and-so I was assured by Professor Omar Yaghi at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles), one of Popular Science magazine’s Top 10 stars of American science of 2006-hydrogen may flourish as the energy source in laptops and mobile phones before it leaps successfully into transport. Even then, containing costs will be tricky. Geophysicist cum economist Peter Terzakian was quoted in The Australian as saying ‘If all 230 million cars in the US were to switch from petrol to hydrogen, so much electricity would be required to create the hydrogen that 350 new nuclear plants would be needed. Or more than 1000 coal-fired power stations.’
Cars driven by water have turned up regularly as a hot prospect, ever since Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the then Premier of Queensland, drooled over them a generation ago. The idea is a variant on the hydrogen theme: use the electrolysis of water to separate hydrogen and oxygen (as schoolchildren used to see done in science in their first year), harness the hydrogen and expel the oxygen. It may work one day, but don’t expect it to break any land speed records soon.
Diesel, paradoxically, is due for a new golden age- nanoparticle additions, promised by experiments in Oxford, will increase burning and efficiency by 8-10 per cent while removing foul exhaust fumes. Cars running on diesel already offer greater mileage without incurring the large outlays and battery renewal costs of hybrids.
Biofuels have everyone swooning in fresh anticipation (the love affair erupts every fifteen years, to coincide with the latest oil crisis) and the yield could be colossal. Ethanol is an American boondoggle. It is used as a way for politicians in Washington to appease farmers (as brutally enacted in the TV show The West Wing, during primaries in the presidential race). At worst, the fuel requires its equivalent in oil to produce. The best outcome involves using crop residues, so a double benefit is achieved. Dr Timothy Jones, at the University of Arizona at Tucson, has even discussed mining America ’s vast number of landfills, where concentrated organic matter could provide anything from methane to oils. He claims more than 20 per cent of his nation’s fossil fuels could be replaced in this way. Ron Oxburgh says this source could one day be enough to run America ’s entire fleet of cars and trucks.
Ron is a sheer delight as a friend. He’s as eminent as you can get without being embalmed. House of Lords, former head of Imperial College London, once head of Defence Procurement in the UK, a lively chairman of Shell Oil, this snowy-haired, bushy-browed geologist, with his lilting, almost-Welsh accent, is as close to being the best authority on energy anywhere. At our last meeting in Sydney, at the end of 2006, he was as outspoken as ever about climate change:
The evidence that emissions from fossil fuels are modifying the Earth’s climate is overwhelming. Unless we act fast to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there will be damaging and irreversible environmental change; and Australia looks like being very vulnerable. There will be costs, but doing nothing is even more expensive in the long run.
He was proved right almost immediately, when it was announced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology early in 2007 that we are already suffering more than almost any other nation from the effects of climate change.
So what does Ron recommend? In terms of transport-linked sources, there are quite a few possibilities, but it is their adjuncts that will make the difference. He says that the intermittent-flow energy technologies-such as wind, solar and tidal power-will be transformed by redox flow batteries, which can store unlimited amounts of juice and make it available instantly. These energy cells, also known as vanadium redox batteries and patented by UNSW in 1986, are being harnessed to store wind power by the Irish, who expect to get half of their base-load electricity from this source in the near future.
Then there’s the jatropha tree. It grows in arid zones and in Australia is regarded as a weed. Its nut yields an oil that can be produced for about $US3.60 a gallon (about 60 cents more than ordinary diesel). The residue can be used to feed cattle, says Ron, and he has put some of his own money into schemes now flourishing in Mali, Tanzania, India, Thailand and South Africa. The key to success will be quality control in refining.
Lord Oxburgh, like Tim Jones, is keen on oil from corpses. Here is how Brad Lernley of Cosmos magazine reported this story:
It is the worst stuff in the world. Eighteen tonnes of turkey offal-rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines and lungs swollen with putrid gases-slides down a dump truck into a 24-metre-long hopper with a sickening glorp. The smell is worse than the sight: an assertive mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct faecal note.
But two hours later, sterile as you please, an oil truck pulls up behind this Thermal Conversion Process plant in the small American Midwest town of Carthage, Missouri, and the driver attaches a hose from a nearby stationary tank to the truck’s intake valve. One hundred and fifty barrels of oil (23,800 L), worth $US12,300, gushes into the truck’s tank, and off it goes to an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oil to upgrade the stock.
* * * *
The real challenge, though, it seems to me, will be social. Stunning new machines exist for us to use as trains, planes or road vehicles, but in the main, we misuse them. Concorde has gone, super trains are exotic wonders, and Arnie’s Tesla car could legally use only one-tenth of its capacity on Australia ’s roads.
Imagine, instead, a transport system in which the approach of your bus would be signalled with a ping on your mobile phone and you could stroll to the bus stop knowing the wait would be barely a minute (this technology is ready). Imagine forsaking your car (converting the garage into
a romper room or workshop) and having a vehicle-a carlet-only when you really needed it. As private cars already cost more than the taxi equivalent of trips taken, you would also save heaps. Imagine taking trains from the centre of town and moving at 300-350 kph to your destination, getting off just a five-minute walk from where you want to be. Imagine making a plane trip special again, instead of a long-distance endurance test.
Imagine biking or walking (running) to where you want to be, without playing dodgems with killer traffic. And imagine converting your rushed attendance at the gym into a health-giving routine, in which your legs don’t engage with a treadmill going nowhere but take you where you want to be. Imagine that your exercise in exasperation, in going shopping at the supermarket beyond the ring road with three apoplectic kids, is turned into an Internet search for bargains followed by delivery right to your door by an electric go-cart. Imagine travelling only when you really want to. All the time with a smug grin on your face from your appreciation that you’re not wrecking the neighbourhood.
And that future could be ours. Not in 2027, or 2037- but tomorrow!
* * * *
The Hunches of Nostradamus
2008 Cost of petrol rises from a low point of $0.85 to a high of $2.35 in Australia. Some 56 per cent of people say they would rather die than not drive their cars. Some do.
2009 Singapore and London announce electronic pricing for all roads.
2010 Traffic jams in Beijing and Thailand last four days. Twenty-seven babies born in cars.
2011 Proportion of Sydney residents commuting by car goes up from 72 per cent to 79 per cent. Pedestrian arrested in Canberra.
2012 Petrol reaches $3.20 a litre. Twenty-four per cent of Saudi Arabians are billionaires.
2013 In Sydney and Melbourne 347 car drivers die of starvation.
2014 Japanese launch railway network with bullet trains travelling at 670 kph.
2015 Richard Branson offers trips to the moon for $3.5 million. The first to go find a Starbucks in the Sea of Tranquillity.
2016 Perth removes all cars from within city boundaries. Citizens discover legs.
2017 In Beijing pollution causes fall in life expectancy to 29 years.
2018 Oil Wars break out. Sydney executives no longer allowed free car as part of salary package. Most break down and cry.
2019 Texans accept declared state of emergency and pledge to limit each family to only three 4WDs.
2020 Australian PM rides bike to work. Gets there twenty minutes early.
2024 Government finally removes tax concessions on 4WD purchases.
5. The Future of Cities – More than Half the World’s Population?
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
– Abba Eban, Israeli statesmen,
Vienna is one of my favourite cities. I grew up there. It is small, elegant and, like the old Sydney suburb of Balmain, shows organic growth-old parts remain and flourish amid the new. Green vistas are fresh alongside the venerable buildings. Private mansions mix with terraces and office blocks; the history is visible, and you can see how the future will be able to mesh into the spaces available.
Harry Seidler used to make much of this. He would show pictures of the heart of Vienna, near the great St Stephen’s Cathedral, where ancient structures stand in harmonious juxtaposition with spanking fresh shining ones. The mix of old and new is possible, he insisted;
Future Perfect you don’t need to quarantine the historic. (Federation Square in Melbourne does this superbly.) Nor does modern housing require a scorched-earth policy, a start from ground zero.
How many times have you looked down from a plane and seen fresh clover-shaped scars where new roads outline the shapes of instant suburbs being prepared, as if homes are about to land intact from the sky, delivered by ET? Kit towns. When you walk through them after they are finished, they seem strangely dehumanised and lonely places.
The 1960s and ‘70s were notorious for this kind of development. It was as if any kind of housing would do-a legacy from the Second World War, when shelter at all costs was required. In the 21st century we face greater simultaneous challenges: vast populations, water shortages, killer pollution and climate change. This year, according to the United Nations, more people will live in cities than in countryside: three billion of us squashed into barely 2 per cent of the earth’s surface.
One of the paradoxes of this movement of the poor in search of food and work is that the conurbations have spread over the best agricultural land. Towns were established long ago next to fertile fields and good water; now concrete has covered them in the quest for lebensraum. Vast Dickensian shantytowns and slums ring the great cities of South America, Asia and Africa. What answers has science got to this historic challenge? Maybe Vienna has a few. That is where the UN Population Division has offices, on the city’s outskirts by a pine forest, housed in a modernised palace. That is where, in 1996, their head demographer assured me that the world population will grow by 33 per cent, to nine billion, but then plateau and stabilise by about 2060.
So, how to combine the old with the new, as symbolised by those rustic UN offices and by Vienna itself? New Scientist magazine summed up the answer this way in an editorial in June 2006: ‘Greens are prone to idealising the past. They instinctively look back to a pre-industrial pastoral idyll, or to the age of hunter-gatherers living in harmony with their environment. In this view, urbanisation and the rise of the mega-city are harbingers of doom. City dwellers, after all, make up only half of the world’s population but consume three quarters of the resources and generate three quarters of its pollution.’ The magazine notes all the urban experiments from China to Australia, and counsels: ‘This is the challenge environmentalists should embrace. The good news is that cities, far from being environmental basket cases, are uniquely well-equipped for the task.’
There are schemes to bring the country into town: urban forests, rooftop gardens which spread down the walls of tall buildings (incidentally cutting the heating and cooling bills by 20 per cent); rivers and streams flowing through channels in streets (as they do traditionally in Japanese villages); built-in self-sufficiency in water and power via tanks and solar collectors; the return of city allotments, like those where granddads once grew fresh veg; car-free zones, with electronic transport and space-age bikes.
Many of these additions have hidden costs. The roof gardens and forests will require more concrete and structural support, for example. But all this is a matter of finetuning, like many aspects of green engineering, from biofuels to hydrogen power. We need to find out the limits of what works and keep within them. But the potential is huge. The current waste is staggering. London is four times more profligate with power than it need be. Most of this energy is lost by the city’s buildings and could be fixed using existing technology. (Airconditioning, which may cost more in power than a city’s cars, can now be designed into a new building, and be essentially free). Add the energy cost of congestion, now successfully being tackled by Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge, and the figure would probably double: you could make London, and presumably most Australian cities, eight times more energy efficient today.
The ABC’s Sydney headquarters, where I work, is a choice example. The older part is now seventeen years old. The recently added tower is about four. Despite this newness, you see many flagrant signs of bodge as you walk around. After even moderate rain you will find from ten to fifteen buckets placed on the expanse of the third floor to catch torrents coming through the glass-and-steel roof. A little way along is the grand new library. Fifty-seven powerful lamps are cantilevered to shine their hot illumination through the glass ceiling skywards, as if trying to bleach the clouds. I asked the folk working there whether they were puzzled by this weird and wasteful engineering, but they said they hadn’t even noticed it.
As we wrestle with stories about the wide brown, increasingly desiccated land, I still note the incessant automatic flu
shing of the ABC men’s toilets (we must have 70 or 80) pouring drinking water into the pissoirs every five minutes morning, noon and night. It’s nuts. (Am I the only one, incidentally, to be gobsmacked by the public infatuation with bottled water? Not only would the plastic bottles America discards every hour reach ‘all the way to the moon’, but the money we’re prepared to squander on ‘spring’ water-which we can’t differentiate from the tap variety-beggars belief. In 2005, Sydneysiders were challenged to assess the cost of two displays of water set up in Martin Place: a full 18,000-L rain tank versus the equivalent in bottles. The tank water cost $21.60, the bottles $29,880!)
I was delighted to hear that one of the first actions of our new ABC CEO, Mark Scott, was to bring in energy consultant Gavin Gilchrist. First, he asked Mark whether he really needed 28 lights on in his office in the middle of a bright summer’s day; would he be inclined to do the same at home? Then Gavin revealed that most firms would save 30-40 per cent on their energy bills just by applying bog-ordinary commonsense measures. (Now the ABC has announced it will introduce water-free urinals, two-sided printing and power-saving adjustments to electronic equipment. We are under way, at last!)
All these ideas, and more, were showcased in Brisbane at the end of July 2006, when five Nobel laureates, including an exuberant Mikhail Gorbachev, and scores of experts on the urban challenge, attended the Earth Dialogues. Much discussion was idealistic and ranged from global concerns to parochial gripes about Queensland ’s dams and tunnels.
Several stars stood out. Anumita Roychowdhury, from New Delhi, one of the authors of Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India , showed pictures of the blackened lungs of citizens in Indian megalopolises and announced that bad air now kills as many Asians, especially children, as foul water. Nicholas You, an urbane Chinese architect working with UN-Habitat on strategic planning, warned that sprawl is the greatest threat to the world’s cities, as it produces ‘irreversible changes in consumption of land and water’. Both counselled the creation of urban villages within big cities, in which convenient services and work would make walking a preferred option to gridlocked commuting.
Future Perfect Page 7