The End of the Road
Freight
and Public Transport
How Freight would change
Freight
In order to minimise the infrastructure construction costs, there needs to be a low maximum weight limit. Perhaps as low as 1500kg which is also necessary to ensure that individual pods have the power to accelerate into the gaps created in chains at entry junctions, and this applies whether the cargo is an electric generator or a rugby team.
What that means is that the existing freight transport business models have to change.
The new system as a whole is a point to point, an individual address to individual address delivery system that can handle any sort of cargo, with the single proviso that anything weighing more than a ton is sub divided into components.
The current system is largely driven by economies of scale. that is, a reluctance to have a driver hauling 1 tonne when they could be hauling 44. The system relies on bulk transport to intermediate distribution warehouses with each product being handled multiple times.
However, most goods end up in the retail sector one way or another. So if there was no driver to pay, then the goods could be handled only once, and distributed directly from the import warehouse or manufacturer to the end retailer or final user, in autonomous pods. This also reduces goods handling by eliminating much of the multiple handling at intermediate warehouses. It also improves overall delivery times, useful for perishable goods - or perhaps the opportunity to reduce the amount of preservatives in food.
The alternative system might work like this:.
Freight would be broken down into much smaller units much earlier in the supply chain. This could be at the factory, or at the dockside for imported goods. The traditional wholesaler or distributor would be located (or virtually located) at this point, loading goods for small retail outlets or end users. And then dispatching them using the autonomous pods
In practice, this would mean that when goods are manufactured or imported, they would be divided into pod sized units, or the warehouse would be extended to accommodate the retail distribution sub divisions as well, thereby dispatching the goods directly to the end user.
No doubt obstacles to this can be generated. For instance, it may not make sense to send an entire pod halfway across the country to deliver a print cartridge to a domestic user. But to every invented hurdle, there will be numerous answers. In this case perhaps the solution is a type of mobile vending machine full of print cartridges that you can summon on demand and then it makes its own way to the next customer; or perhaps a multi drop delivery pod with numbered keysafe compartments so that you can unload your own delivery, and send the pod on to the next customer. And this could operate on an exact ETA rather than a half day or two hour scheduled delivery time.
But what about the large items delivered by the current road system?
True, but most of them are manufactured from component parts. So the design of these would change so that the component parts would be assembled at the end site that they were required, and this in itself may require the establishment of 'pop up' manufacturing plants for eg large transformers, which would be wound at the end user site.
Public Transport
All forms of public transport would disappear - busses, coaches, trains and flights within an internal landmass.
Naturally, market forces wold introduce an extemsive taxi service where a pod not owned by the individual is provided at a cost. However, this cost be be very low because the cost of a pod would be low and there is no need for a driver which is the major cost of a current day taxi service
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