Updating the Operating System for US Freight

Have you ever seen The World Food Clock? According to the food clock, the world produces an average of 7,000 tons of food every minute of every day. The average American consumes over five pounds of food every day. A significant portion of this food travels over 1,500 miles before it reaches a mouth. Food is only one aspect of freight. It’s actually one of the more compact, lighter forms of cargo distributed internationally. Still, it’s worth mentioning because, well — everybody eats.

Beyond food, freight includes extracted resources like coal, petroleum, ores, chemicals, minerals, and forest products. Also, don’t forget retail products which vary in size from earbuds to Escalades to earthmovers.

This amounts to billions of tons traveling billions of miles using planes, trains, and automobiles.

All of these numbers more or less force the question: isn’t there a better way?

Should we improve our present infrastructure, or should we completely redesign our shipping systems? Should we do a little bit of both?

Taking it a step further, we might ask: how does distant future technology, such as space travel, drones, and extracting resources from meteorites factor into our plans for updating infrastructure, or does it? Perhaps the most important question of all, is will we find a way for our infrastructure designs to work with a growing global marketplace and support the vitality of local, small economies?

How you define “better” however, is as important as any of these questions, and a critical starting point to solving the problem. Critical benchmarks may include increased physical capacity, greater overall efficiency, alternative fuel integration, and the ability to painlessly adopt new technology at an ever-increasing pace. Those are just the tip of the iceberg, however, and imagining the future of infrastructure is, ultimately, a largely creative process. We can’t predict the future, but we can be bettered prepared.

AEM knows that solutions and innovations are out there and they would like to award you for your radical redesigns! If you have an insight into what would make freight infrastructure work in 2050 sign up and get involved in AEM’s 2050 Vision Challenge.

Originally published at herox.com.