Tesla Master Plan, Part Trois — 2
If you’re just joining us, Tesla has moved from a hypothetical Lotus electric car to a dominant player on the bleeding edge of automobile manufacturing. In the first entry of this three-part series we discussed how Tesla’s semi-truck will be the vehicle (pun intended) for a ubiquitous autonomous landscape.
Picture this. You walk out to your garage, unplug your Tesla Model 3 from the Tesla Powerwall that was charged all day yesterday from your Tesla Roof, and sit in the driver seat as you put the finishing touches on the report you’re presenting this morning to your boss. Laptop open on your knee your car whisks you out of your suburban neighborhood onto the interstate, takes an earlier exit because of a real-time traffic update of an accident on your normal route, and deposits you at the front door of your office. You exit and either A) list your car on the TAC network or B) tell your car to go park itself at the secure parking garage just outside the city or more likely C) tell it to return home and park itself safely in your garage, “and oh be a good lad and plug yourself in incase I want to go out tonight, DD”.
If you don’t think this has a drastic impact on Urban Design you’re out of your mind. Here’s why.
Urban Design
By 2050, the urban population will increase by 75% to 6.3 billion, from 3.6 billion in 2010. By 2025, there will be 37 ‘megacities’, up from 23 today, and 12 of these will be in emerging markets. And 1.5 million residents a month have moved and will continue to move to Chinese cities for the rest of this decade (source).
We will have to restructure our cities. We must ensure that commerce, transportation, living, and sanitation have a flexible structure on which to evolve. Now, with the announcement and progress of Elon Musk’s latest company (The Boring Company) the morning routine outlined above changes only slightly.
Instead of getting onto the highway you drive onto a Boring Sled, descend to a subterraneous tunnel, and skip along on a skiff at 200 km/hr to arrive at your destination. For reference Musk claims that one could get from Westwood, Los Angeles to LAX Airport in about 6 minutes (a current travel time of about an hour). We could also talk about HyperLoops between LA and SF, DC and NYC, ATL and Jacksonville, Dallas to Chicago.
Both of these “solutions” are what I’d call Newtonian solutions, engineering solutions. In both cases, if they work, will be the go-to transportation method of the rich, the elite, and the economically independent.
But what about the rest of us?
Transportation and Traffic for All
The best solutions are democratic in their ownership and use. As Carnegie once said,
“I love that the President of the United States can’t get a better Coke-A-Cola than the bum on the street.”
You may have seen one of Rory Sutherland’s TED Talk’s before. If you haven’t, fix that. He gave an example that remarkably applies to the HyperLoop/Boring dream. Over £6 Billion was spent on the EuroStar to decrease the travel time between Heathrow and Paris by about 40 minutes. For 0.01% of the money you could have installed free wifi on the train, which wouldn’t have decreased the duration but made it much more enjoyable. For maybe 10% you could pay all the world’s top male and female supermodels to walk the length of the train handing out free champagne. You’d still have £5 Billion left over and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.
Yes, Hyperloop and Boring are cool ideas. But they tackle big problems with big expensive solutions. In business that’s called strategy. As Sutherland says, it’s decidedly better than something that costs a lot and accomplishes absolute bugger all, that’s called Consultancy. That is worse than Trivia which costs nothing and accomplishes nothing.
There’s a fourth thing here, called Arbitrage. It has little cost relative to the rest of available options and creates an enormously large effect. In the investment world, this is referred to as high Alpha. In physics, you might say leverage. If you’re a student, espresso is squarely in this category.
Tesla and Elon Musk have this solution staring them in the face but, as it happens, they drive Teslas and likely aren’t ever exposed to it. They simply deal with the problem — which is too much traffic and too little parking.
It’s not surprising. Parking currently holds an absurd valuation. A parking spot in Park Slope, Brooklyn is currently valued at $300,000. You read that right. Not the parking garage. A single, parking spot. Tell me this doesn’t sound like the NYC taxi medallion market pre-Uber.
The establishment of Bogotá has found a different solution.
“People seem to think that parking is a constitutional right to be protected in the United Nations Charter.” — Enrique Peñalosa, Mayor of Bogotá
If you’ve seen Urbanized, the third in a series of documentary films by Gary Hustwit, you know that what creates traffic is not the number of cars or the number of roads or the number of lanes on that road but the number of trips. The number of trips required to live your life fuels traffic.
“The first article in every constitution states that all citizens are equal before the law…That means that a bus with 80 passengers has a right to 80X the road space than a car with one.”
In every city in the USA traffic is an increasing problem and buses are viewed like combined TV and DVD players — yuck. In Bogotá, and elsewhere, they have implemented a branded Bus Rapid Transport system (BRT). Why brand the Bogotá BRT as TransMilenio? To make buses sexy!
Stations are above ground, air conditioned, and function like a subway station with keycard access. A TransMilenio pulls up, the doors of bus and station align, and 100 people get off and on in 30 seconds. Stations can be built in as little as two weeks.
BRTs have tried to gain popularity in the United States. However, there is a common thread when they succeed, and one that is absent in every US case; private bus lanes. Buses cannot deal with traffic or the entire system falls apart. To the legislators reading this, if you’re going to win in the long run you’re going to have to piss some people off in the short run.
Is it better than subway or light rail? I live in Denver. 20 years ago you would have been told that the hub of the city in the future would be in DTC (Denver Tech Center). It’s a 30 minute drive south of the city. So, the city created a multibillion-dollar public transportation plan called FasTracks to create an electric above-ground subway system connecting Denver, DTC, and Boulder. But you cannot walk anywhere when you’re in DTC. You need a car. Every Denver native will tell you that traffic is worse than ever. And where do the startups have their offices? Where do the businesses want to move to for their new office? Downtown, where the shops and the bars, and the people are. Not to DTC.
A city needs to be able to grow and expand. Even now, Harlem is being gentrified despite every expert telling you otherwise a decade ago. BRT stations can be built in as little as two weeks and torn down and moved if the city center ever evolves.
If you’re going to win in the long run you’re going to have to piss some people off in the short run.
For the same amount of money that they could have done 25 km of subway Peñalosa and his team put in 400 km of TransMilenio. The BRT in Guangzhou, China moves more people per hour than every subway and metro in China combined except for one line in Beijing at a fraction of the cost.
But the L Train will be closed for 15 months?
The 21st Century Workhorse
In the next 50 years more than half of those cities which will exist in 2060 will be built. Currently our cities are too crowded, too noisy, too polluted, and too dangerous. In 1898 at the first international urban-planning conference convened for a 10 day session outside New York. They left three days later after deciding that NYC would not survive 20 years as each street would be filled with three feet of horse manure.
The automobile became the workhorse of the 20th Century city. We need a Tesla eBRT to become the workhorse of the 21st Century city.
If I were in charge of strategy for Tesla (and Elon, I’m only a phone call away) the next vehicle we create would be a fleet of powertrain buses to create the first fully sustainable, off the grid, silent, zero emission e-BRT system in the world.
Rejoice, Casey Neistat. NYC could have silent buses.
Imagine the same BRT system you’ve seen in Guangzhou or Bogotá but where the buses accelerate immediately. Where the roads are safer because there’s no downshifting. Where clouds of exhaust don’t follow these big noisy people-boxes as they cumbersomely sludge through traffic. And where the stations can be built with Tesla Roof panels on top to be a complete point solution for a city as it grows, without requiring conjoining infrastructure.
Is it any wonder why Tencent recently acquired 5% of TSLA?
Now I can keep up with most engineers and scientists when they speak, debate, or nerd out. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t browsing the Wikipedia entries on QED at 2 AM once a month. I don’t know what it would cost to create a Tesla Urban Bus.
But I have to imagine that, building on the torque and powertrain of the Tesla Semi (for which a working prototype already exists) with a bus chassis would quickly create a working model. From there Tesla could experiment with terminal design, mounting two Tesla Powerwalls in the back of the buses for redundancy, the sizing the appropriate powertrain underneath, and affixing solar panels to the roof, etc.
At the pace Tesla currently cranks out product I can’t see this taking more than 12 months. After all, a bus is a flatter and longer semi-truck with increased safety. Most of the technology is already built and market-tested.
Elon if you’re looking for a beta tester I’m sure one of the Gavin Belson types would give it a go to ferry employees back and forth.
A Seat for Everyone
By creating this system Tesla brings democratization to clean urban transportation while gaining monopolization of it. It gives the world a sustainable and carbon neutral system of transportation for years to come. It creates jobs for all those truck drivers formerly forced to travel away from their families. It gives government an economically responsible and flexible mode of infrastructure. It gives Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities a way to attract younger talent. It gives government a way to show priority to the poor and to technology. It instantly opens the doors to the nexus of all political, economic, and social hubs throughout the world.
And it creates an insatiable hunger for batteries.
In the words of Musk himself, “we need to address a global market.”
