The Drive to Suburbia.

So the title is kind of a pun. The problem is that I hate puns. Oh well. This is the beginning on a three post series (I like threes and sevens..) on future economic frontiers in transportation. Boring, huh? Then don’t read it. Hahaha. (I get to be eccentric. It’s my blog.)

About two years ago, I’m on this ten hour drive with some friends, coming back from a resort in the mountains. I get totally restless on a drive that long, so I start thinking. This thing totally occurs to me about opportunity cost. A ten hour journey is prohibitive for routine purposes. But the same journey is still about 8 hours door-to-door if you were to fly on a major commercial carrier. A charter Cessna is prohibitively expensive, even though the journey would probably only be 3 hours door-to-door with a light aircraft. So the transportation cost is an amalgam of the time and the monetary expenses involved. Both of these factors are a function of available technology.

All of this is basic econ. Here’s the crazy part: it has something to do with how we live. So back in the day, back when it was hard, when we had to walk uphill both ways because we were hard-core like that, we lived in hunter-gatherer societies. Eventually, we got bored of that and decided that we want to live in one place. So we built nice Ziggurats and the like and start growing crops. In the process, we invent real estate. Yuck. Everything is cool, though, because as farmers, we live the same place we work. Not much in the way of transportation costs. That is, until we start doing crazy things like making things we can’t eat. So we go to factories to make widgets that can be sold for money which can be used to buy food. The problem is that we can’t all live at the factory. We start needing transportation. So this real estate equation gets more complicated. Let’s do some math. Cause math is fun. Sort of.

Equation #1: (Total Real Estate Cost) = (Property Cost) + (Transportation Costs)
Equation #2: (Property Cost) decreases as a function of the square of distance (from pop. center)
Note: Past a certain point, the curve becomes convex to the origin and starts to level out. The unit is cost per unit quantity.
Equation #3: (Transportation Costs) increase as a linear function of distance (from pop. center) Note: This will vary for different modes of transportation. Each will have their own curve for cost per unit distance.
Equation #4: (Total Real Estate Utility) = (Property Utility) - (Transportation Utility Cost)
Equation #5: (Transportation Utility Cost) is an exponential function of distance, as it is a function of time. Its slope varies with different modes of transportation.

What does this mean? Two major things: first, changing modes of transportation greatly affect possibilities frontiers. If there are new transportation options, previously practically inaccessible real estate becomes available. Second, and as a function of this, the ‘carrying capacity’ of an area is determined by transportation technologies. As an area approaches its carrying capacity, real estate becomes prohibitively expensive, and leasing becomes more and more the only possible option. This has implications for class structures, as we will see later.
Let’s see this played out in history. Jump back to the industrial society. Now that people no longer live where they work, they have to live somewhere. This is a function of transportation. Public transportation systems are developed. They are efficient given the population densities of the time. (Note that public transportation ceases to be practical or efficient below a certain population density.) So tenement dwellings are constructed for the urban workers. Admittedly, this is a great oversimplification, but play along for a while. So the cities hit their carrying capacity, and those who already own land are the ones who make the profits off the rent. Stratification is strong, social mobility relatively low.

After a while cars roll around. There is now a means for people to live much farther from their work. So people who could not previously own land are able to purchase houses. Suburbia follows. People begin the individual commute, roads become the primary means of transportation. (This was greatly facilitated in the United States by the development of the interstate system.) Transportation costs go up, but housing costs go much farther down.
The rise of suburbia has some unique and undeniably middle class effects. With the ability to practically own land, social stratification is lessened. (Admittedly, this affects different groups differently due to inequities in the system. I’m speaking in broad generalities.) Consider Britain vs. America. In Britain, all the land has been owned for a long time. In order to ‘buy in’ to the property holding class, your family has to play good hands for good while. Because of this, the social stratification is stronger. For the American suburbanite, the buy-in cost is very low, easily achievable within a generation. Owning a token amount of land creates a middle-class consciousness, rather the total lack of a class consciousness. 95% of Americans self-identify as middle class. Perhaps this explains why (after the fizzling of the IWW ‘Wobblies’) Marxism never really caught on in mainstream America. Marxism points to the dialectic between those who own capital and those who provide labor. This assumes that these are separate groups. The paradox of the middle class is that they are capital-owning laborers. This is epitomized in the small businessman. Note that the only places where Marxism ever really caught on were the campuses of elite colleges, often occupied by the children of the wealthy. They would be some of the few who would really have any sort of non-middle class consciousness. This has sociological effects, to be certain. Some of the most interesting being the anti-gentrification of San Antonio by means of the suburbs. It is hard to segregate when people are simply buying where property values are the best. The suburbs serve as a means of melding cultures in SA. Gentrification seems to be most common in urban areas where all the property has basically static ownership. Tenancy, rather than ownership, seems to be the progenitor to ’white flight.’ This is a topic for another time, but it is ironic that intellectuals who hate suburbs on general principle are generally those who most actively participate in gentrification, which they claim to oppose. As another interesting note, as a child of a very proletarian family (son of a cop and a nurse,) I was very privileged to have trees and a back yard while growing up. I was also privileged to live in a very diverse neighborhood. As popular as it is to hate suburbia, because of suburbia I had opportunities I would never have had otherwise. A hundred years ago, my family would have been in a tenement paying rent to a landlord. Anyways, my point before I started blathering on about sociology was that suburbs are currently approaching carrying capacity. In California and on the East Coast, property values within reasonable commuting range are becoming prohibitive. This is causing a drive toward the mid-west, but certain jobs are still centered on certain cities. There is pressure building toward the next transportation revolution, the next big thing to increase the carrying capacity of population centers. The creation of super-suburbia, a world where an average family will be able to have a weekend home with land, where affordable housing will not become an elusive dream. Where will this revolution be? In the air (of course.)

The next big thing. Flying. Come on, all the cool kids are doing it. But really, the point where individual/family aircraft replace cars as our primary means of commuter transportation is the point where we hit our next revolution. With affordable aircraft, the time and cost per unit distance decreases drastically. What once took 10 hours takes two, so the house that was 4 hours drive and hence inaccessible is now a 30 minute commute. There’s always more sky, so there would not be the same rush hour problems. And you could fly straight there, so you would save time and fuel. Alarm bells. Lots of big problems. First, aren’t airports generally pretty far away? Doesn’t it take a long time to get to one? Yes, if you’re flying a 747. When I first started flying I was astonished at how many little airfields there are scattered around. Many are WWII fields that have been abandoned, but if you count all the repairable fields, I would be surprised if 50% of American homes weren’t within a 15 minute drive of a small airport. That’s a total WAG, though. I grew up around a lot of farmland, and there were two active airparks within 15 minutes. Second big problem, gas costs. If cars are expensive, wouldn’t planes be more so? There are a few factors that mitigate this. Fuel efficiency for a light aircraft is generally not very bad. Most light aircraft use piston engines, just like a car. Instead of pushing against road friction, they are pushing against wind resistance and gravity. You can also fly straight and not idle in traffic, both of which offset fuel costs somewhat. I admit, though, this is a weak point of the model. We must predicate the model upon advances in piston-driven efficiency, or availability of new propulsion technologies. Third big problem, isn’t flying dangerous? Don’t you have to get a lot of training to fly? That’s a longer question to answer.

Burt Rutan (who is awesome) said something once to the effect of personal commuter aviation will never be practical until you can make an airplane which will take home a person stumbling drunk out of a bar. The weakest link is the human element. This is also true on the road, although aviation certainly involves more variables. The human factor problem is complicated by the inaccessibility of aviation. There is a cycle: aircraft are expensive, so few people learn to fly them, so they aren’t mass produced, so they’re expensive. We can adjust this cycle in two places. First, if learning to fly them for commuter purposes was not as demanding, then it would be more practical to learn to fly, which would allow mass production, which would make airplanes cheaper, and even more people would learn to fly. If we made just one Honda Civic, it would be very expensive. Especially if you put in electronics. But if you make a zillion Honda Civics, they’re pretty cheap. (Especially with electronics, which have huge economies of scale.)

Flight safety warning horn! If learning to fly was not as demanding, we would have a zillion unsafe wanna-be pilots trying to pull Kennedies all over the place. The current leading cause of aviation mishaps is pilot error. This has been true for some time, and will almost certainly remain true as materials technology continues to improve. So you engineer the human element to a minimum. The human becomes the safety observer, where he is only flying in emergency circumstances. To teach safety observer skills for a highly automated platform would take, perhaps 10 hours. This basic course would give the commuter the ability to program the navigation system, to recognize problems with automated systems checks, and to fly and land the aircraft given very specific instructions. The aircraft would have graceful failure modes (to be discussed in the aircraft design section,) and only in the most dire of circumstances would the commuter actually have to fly. In fact, disengaging the FCS would be an override that the commuter would later have to explain to the FAA, as emergencies currently are (of course, manual override would always remain an option.) An Iridium-style self contained satellite communications system would allow the commuter to connect to a very directive controller in the event of total systems failure. The controller would set him or her up on a very long final, monitor the approach from GPS fixes in the radio, and direct a go-around if necessary. Second flight safety thing. We all know how many beater cars are out there driving. If your engine dies while driving, you pull over. Obviously, you can’t pull over the aircraft. Two fixes. First, maintenance. In order to fly, you would have to have routine inspections performed by qualified maintainers. Second, controlled landings. More ambitious solution, allow the flight control system to reference a database of suitable landing or ditching sites, and allow the commuter to select one (free of obstructions,) and allow the aircraft to land itself there. Less ambitious is the equip aircraft with parachutes (as has been recently been suggested in several flight journals.)
Should this light aircraft revolution occur at some point, there would be systemic effects. First, our Air Traffic Control system would have to drastically change. One option may be to keep the current Class A airspace for the traditional ATC functions, and primarily communicate with individual commuter aircraft (and their flight control systems) through data-link (mostly transparent to the commuters.) Back-up would be voice comms. Separate emergency channels would be reserved for emergency controllers for aircraft using Iridium comms due to total electrical failure. Many functions would have to be automated, but this would be facilitated by the establishment of a GPS-based airways system (to replace our old VOR system that concentrates aircraft into small channels.) Maintenance markets would come about to do preflight and routine inspections (which would be simplified by BIT (built in test) functions of the aircraft.) Arrival taxi services (vans that went from the small airports to the workplace or the home) would become profitable, and provide an option other than driving. So of course things would change, just as they changed when we had cars (stoplights and the like.)

One could make an analogy to steam engines ending up at cars. The first few non-organic earth-bound conveyances were merely a novelty. At some point the steam engine gets harnessed for mass transport, though. The railway system comes about, where full-time conductors and manually operated switches keep everything safe. Then, there is a revolution in propulsion systems in the piston engine, and you get generally practical and affordable individual means of transportation. You do not need a full time conductor to run the car, nor do you need individuals to manually turn on or off lights to direct the car. We are at locomotives with modern aviation. Trained and experienced professional pilots follow individually issued instructions for safety’s sake. And rightfully so. At some point, though, the locomotive gives way to the car (even though trains remain even today.)

What will this mean economically and socially? Like the car, the ICA (individual commuter aircraft) will start with the well off, who will cause the initial rudimentary infrastructure to be built. This will make the prospect of a rural weekend home or ranch a possibility for the urban working rich or the upper middle class. At some point, as R&D costs decrease, the ICA comes down to price. Then the prospect of super-suburbs becomes a possibility, where ICAs fill the role cars currently occupy in our extant suburbs. As ICAs grow more prevalent, urban spheres of influence expand, which will result in the megalopolis (already starting in Cali and on the US East Coast.) As opposed to the Japanese megalopolis, though, housing will be affordable. And kids still get to grow up with trees in their backyards.

So next time, we get to design this mythical ICA. (To be continued in The Airplane for the Masses.)