Pandemics and the Future of Public Transport
How will an increased need for social distancing influence how we travel and commute?
Public transport systems will be very important in the future, not just if we want to reduce carbon emissions, but also because compact transport is required for the growing megacities. However, during epidemics and pandemics like the COVID-19 pandemic that rages at the time of writing, we are told to keep our distance to each other. Recurring pandemics may well be a characteristic of the future, particularly in the face of the growing issue of antibiotic resistance, so how can we reconcile the need for compact transport with the need to keep our distance?
Although our world at times may seem to be in the solid grip of the automobile, we are seeing a growth of public transport all over the world. Cities build metro systems, light rail is expanding in suburbs, and high-speed rail systems connect our major cities. Where there aren’t trains, you can usually go by bus or ferry. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic may change all that and tip the scales in favour of the private car, unless we change the way we design public transport.
A few days ago, my wife and I went for a walk in Copenhagen after being cooped up in our apartment for several days, of course keeping our distance to other pedestrians while doing so. As we walked, we saw no buses, but plenty of private cars with one or (rarely) two people. Cars are closed bubbles that are naturally shielded against viruses, and the same can’t be said about buses that naturally force you together with other people, usually strangers. Even bicycles aren’t safe from the coughs of pedestrians or other bicyclists. Hence, it may come as no surprise that if people have access to a car, they will use it for transport when they need to go out. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people even have bought new cars as a safety measure during the pandemic.
It may be that things return to normal once the coronavirus crisis is over, but it isn’t unlikely that pandemics may be a recurring feature in the 21st century. It is only 11 years since we had the H1N1/09 or ‘swine flu’ pandemic, which may have killed more than half a million people worldwide, and in the early years of the century, we had the SARS pandemic, caused by a coronavirus similar to COVID-19, which fortunately led to less than a thousand casualties. More local outbreaks of ebola, measles, and cholera have taken the lives of tens of thousands during this century, and annual influenza outbreaks also take their toll. With more people living close together in megacities, and travelling more around the world, the risk of a pandemic running out of control seems greater than ever. One more sizeable pandemic in the near future could well be the death knell of public transport — unless we can take measures to reduce the risk of contagion associated with public transport.
One step may be to isolate people more from each other while on public transport. Rather than having large, open buses and train carriages, we can divide them into smaller compartments holding just two or four people, directly accessible from the street or railway platform, keeping passengers separated by glass walls. When a compartment is vacated, it can be disinfected by ultraviolet light or a disinfectant spray, making it safe for the next passengers. A green light above a door indicates that it is now safe to enter.
Local trains may even be divided into small carts that can separate and connect, taking passengers directly to their destination without stops along the way: When on a station, you enter a free cart, state your destination by voice, and the cart moves to a parallel track where it connects with other carts going in the same direction. When enough carts have connected, or enough time has passed, the train sets off, unlinking carts to a station track whenever a destination is passed, and picking up new carts at the same time. This solution may require extra tracks at stations and that they have room for fewer passengers. It may be logistically difficult to achieve, but it is win-win for passengers, who are whisked directly to their destinations and don’t have to interact with strangers. It is almost like taking a driverless taxi to or from your local station.
Then, of course, you might have to take a taxi to your home or workplace. In the near future, taxis may be driverless — there are already driverless taxis in London — eliminating contact with a human driver, and they may be disinfected between use. Hopefully, it will also be less expensive to use a driverless taxi than one where the driver has to earn a living wage, but time will tell if this will in fact be the case.
You might think that driverless taxis may be the only solution we need for infection-free transport in the future, but I fear this is not the case. For one thing, driverless taxis will not be able to drive much closer than today’s private cars, and for another, driverless taxis are likely to cruise around empty on their way to passengers or just in the algorithmic hope of picking up one off the street. Without mass transit solutions, congestion may be an even bigger issue than today, and having a lot of cars driving around with one or two passengers (or even none) is not very sustainable, even if the cars are electric.
Of course, other solutions exist. We might all be wearing infection-proof bodysuits whenever we venture from home, transparent so we can still show off our fashionable clothes or pick up a tan. The suits may have antimicrobial nanocoatings, eliminating the need for disinfecting your bodysuit before you take it off. Or we may all become permanent shut-ins like the Japanese hikkikomori, rarely or ever leaving our homes and relying on social media, cloud applications, and virtual reality for social contact and work. While this may sound like a dismal solution, there is no denying that it will be quite sustainable if everybody stays at home instead of gallivanting across the country or globe all the time.
