A deep dive into the world A.C. (After Car)
Cars have proven to be a surprisingly resilient invention. We’ve had them for coming up on 135 years now. We sell about $121 billion worth of them a year and while a recession or trade war may make a dip in those numbers, what else are you going to do? Ride a bus?
There aren’t many other late-19th century inventions that are still a huge part of our lives. Sure we like Coca-Cola, but it doesn’t define us (outside of certain parts of Atlanta, maybe) and even things like Edison’s incandescent light bulb, the typewriter and the old over-the-wires telephone have largely come and gone during the car’s ongoing lifespan.
And none of them have shaped not just our physical geography but our very direction as a species like the car.
There are cars (or at least Toyota pickups) almost literally everywhere. They are in Antarctica and they’ve driven to the North Pole. I picked a random spot in Africa in Google maps—it turned out to be something called Batha-Ouest, Chad, a desert right in the middle of the continent. It’s about the same size as West Virginia, a little more than 20,000 square miles, but it has a little over Chattanooga’s population.
I zoomed in on a stretch of desert that turned out to be 35 miles northwest of a place called Djédaa. And there it was—a set of tire tracks worn into the dust, crossing to...somewhere.
Everywhere, cars. And yet we know they can’t last forever. The infrastructure of roads and parking lots and garages and gas stations and refineries takes up a horrifying portion of the earth’s surface, more than 15 percent of many cities.
Los Angeles, for example, has more than six-and-a-half square miles of surface area of parking, for cars that spend 95 percent of their time not moving. For that five percent of their lives that cars are actually driven, the United States alone used 142.86 billion gallons of gasoline in 2018. 271,804 gallons a second.
It’s hard to visualize that, but it’s about an Olympic swimming pool (164 by 82 feet, six feet deep) every three seconds. A fire company might use a big two-inch attack hose to put water on a fire. It would take more than 65,000 of those hoses flowing at 250 gallons per minute to supply our gas.
The National Fire Protection Association thinks there are 29,819 fire companies in the United States, so every single one of them would need at least two hoses going at full pressure, 24 hours a day. It’s like trying to get a sense of the size of the universe—it’s too big for the human mind.
No one from any political or moral viewpoint can see that as sustainable. Even when we go completely electric over the next 20 or 30 years, we’ll still need all those roads and we’ll be adding an entire new layer of power delivery infrastructure, because unless those Mr. Fusions start hitting the shelves we’re trading one form of power for another.
We’re never going to get flying cars, because they use orders of magnitude more energy than rolling around (see: Mr. Fusion). We’re never going to connect more than the population centers with any kind of mass transit, which leaves (currently) about 60 million people without any way to get around.
There’s been a trend towards rural migration to cities for years, but don’t be surprised if that reverses. I think the combination of remote work and whatever forms of telepresence we’re going to have, with the overnight availability of just about anything, will turn the flow as people realize there’s nothing they can’t get while enjoying a rural quality of life.
Which gives rise to the question: How are we going to get around After Car? There are the first hints of answers now, in ride sharing and fractional car ownership programs. But the bigger answer is, pretty soon we not only won’t need to go anywhere, we won’t want to.
Almost all the pieces are in place to start imagining our post-transportation future. We still do need all kinds of things delivered, but that’s not going to last. It’s slow and sometimes complicated, but today you can 3D print in your home.
At some point that will become much more accessible and while you might not make pots and pans in your study, you might get them made to order at a regional or local fabrication center and have them drone delivered an hour later.
The only thing left is food and that solution is here, too. We are growing meat in a lab today and it’ll be commercially available in the next year or two. There are “cultured” (or alt-meat) proponents who think commercial animal raising will be phased out entirely by the end of the century. I think they’re being conservative and it will happen much faster than that.
Plants we can’t grow in a vat like delicious muscle tissue, but we can and do grow fruits and vegetables hydroponically. When truck distribution systems start to wither away it will become uneconomical to ship avocados 3,000 miles, so produce production too will move away from huge central locations and into smaller local operations.
As our need to move things long distances by road dwindles, roads themselves will become economically unviable. At least for the next century or two, there will probably still need to be some form of infrastructure to move things so large and heavy that that can’t be made locally.
Probably.
One invention—a Mr. Fusion—could change that, though, and make it possible to assemble big things where they’re needed, not where the power is.
By the year 2300, we will be at the very end of the whole idea of going anywhere or moving things. When our virtual worlds are indistinguishable from the concrete one, and the footprint of meeting all of our physical needs shrinks to a neighborhood, our society will be able to take entirely new shapes that we aren’t equipped to imagine.
Sure, there will be people who enjoy the satisfaction of walking in the woods or roller skating in the woods, but what they experience will be exactly the same as the person who does it from home. Matrix-like, you won’t be able to tell the difference.
There will be iconoclasts who live off grid, who form back-to-the-land communes, but their ability to interact with anyone else will be severely limited.
It will probably make sense from an energy standpoint for us to congregate in groups of some size, if only because it’s likely to be inefficient for everyone to supply all their own power needs, fabricate all their own goods and produce all their own food...unless we have Star Trek replicators, in which case all bets are off. How large our population centers will be is a question we can’t answer yet, but will they be cities?
Cities are an efficient use of space, and technology will only make them more livable and efficient. Dense, Northeastern-style cities have far more economic productivity density than a sprawling Houston or Phoenix, so during the waning years of cars and personal transportation, that model is the one that will predominate.
The spread-out Los Angeleses of the world will develop cities within cities, areas of greater density arising out of the suburbs and recreating city cores. New construction, however, is much less economically efficient that rehabbing old, and towns and small cities which currently have dilapidated urban cores will at long last find those old main streets becoming attractive targets for redevelopment.
Less and less will paved roadways physically link these population centers and our landscape will revert to what will resemble a medieval model, consisting of a small number of large cities, scattered smaller communities and occasional groups living away from society. In between, the land will be returned to nature, crossed by whatever small threads of transportation we don’t abandon.
As we increasingly live physically disconnected lives, population will shrink, although there’s no reason to think we can’t vat grow people, too. Across the world the changes will come at wildly varying rates, with some places actively resisting; and resources, geography, and population density making it a long time until the tracks outside Batha-Ouest fade back into the sand.
But just as the car went everywhere, it will slowly roll away, until the last diesel Mercedes 300 parks for the last time.
The car and the notion of easy transportation have shaped our very view of reality to such a degree that we can’t imagine another way of existing. It’s built into the structures of our society and forms the context with which we understand the world. Even when all of the technology to make that idea obsolete exists in the not-too-distant future, it will require generations of slowly changing the way we frame our thoughts before it is fully embraced.
But for the meantime, we still have our cars, our trucks, our thousands of miles of paved road, and our never-ending thirst for fossil fuels. So enjoy them while they last, for however many (or few) years we have them to rely upon.
“Keep your motor running / head out on the highway / searching for adventure / and whatever comes our way.” —Steppenwolf