Infrastructure

For the first time in our history, most of us live in cities.  We are a social species, so urban living suits us in many ways.  Network effects and economies of scale should reduce our costs and environmental footprints, multiply social and economic opportunities, and provide novelty.

Cities should be cheap and easy to live in, but there is a critical bottleneck: the high cost of housing.  This is not just because suitable urban land is scarce, and housing supply can't keep up with demand.  The deeper problem is technological. Our legacy infrastructure has created a market failure.

Our infrastructure networks for transport, water and electricity are complex and expensive to build.  As a result, instead of building more where we need them, people and jobs migrate to where existing infrastructure already clusters.  We crowd into megacities, which creates complex and unrecognised economic pressures.

A rich city may try and improve its own infrastructure and housing, but isolated success will only attract more people to move there from places with less (an expanded form of induced demand). For a calmer future, we need to be able to easily build infrastructure networks where we people need them. We need a new paradigm.

We are so used to our reality, a thought experiment may help.  Imagine you magically have a teleporter, and can easily travel anywhere.  After the initial excitement wears off, where do you choose to live?  Many of us might enjoy visiting big cities, but choose to avoid the high costs of living in one.

Now imagine everyone has easy and cheap access to teleporters.  How would that change housing markets, and the nature of work more broadly?  Would we choose to live in megacities at all?  This thought experiment suggests transport, and infrastructure more broadly, distorts our choices more than we realise.

You never change things
by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model
that makes the existing model obsolete.

– Buckminster Fuller

Teleporters aren’t realistic, but in this analysis of congealed transport I explore a solution which is practical.  Based on a new generation of simple, light vehicles, it allows to build cheap, fast, powerful infrastructure where we actually need it, combining state-of-the-art transport, power and data networks.

The infrastructure we inherit is an accident of history: which technologies were cheap and practical when it was created. Our major paradigms are now more than a century old, and require renewal or replacement.

During a tumultuous period, turnpike roads were replaced by canals, which in turn were soon rendered largely obsolete by railways, then paved highways. Animal, water and wind power were replaced by steam, internal combustion engines, and finally electric motors. Communication networks for mail, telegraphs and radio were built, and electricity strode across landscapes on huge pylons.

A calmer future requires a new paradigm of integrated infrastructure, which is cheaper to build, but more flexible, powerful and resilient, than the separate ones we rely on now. It must offer an easy upgrade path for failing legacy systems in richer countries. More importantly, it will be affordable for the majority of world, where infrastructure often does not exist at all.

Radically improved infrastructure will facilitate easier travel. You may fear this will lead to longer working commutes, and expand urban sprawl. Both seem inevitable, given our current economic pressures.

However, those pressures are partly caused by failed transport systems. Instead, the economic pressures will themselves be transformed.