Tag Archives: Transportation

From the Vault: The Mark of Civilization

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My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original contributions. And so: my From the Archives series. This week: Aqueducts and pyramids and highways, oh my.

Diego Delso, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-BY-SA 3.0

Roman Aqueduct, c. 1st century, Spain

When you think about the Roman Empire, one of the first things that pops into mind is their aqueduct system…unless you've been watching too much TV, in which case you’re likely thinking of their gladiators or legions.

I feel pretty comfortable saying that the reason Rome was so stable for so long was due to their roads, aqueducts, sewer system, and other civil projects. It always grates me a little bit when people talk about the gladiatorial games being used to pacify the population—they certainly did that, but this was secondary to having clean water, plenty of food, and sanitation.

Thanks to the Roman Empire's extensive civil improvements, Rome itself had a population of more than a MILLION people. That's just nuts for a city in the ancient world. Athens maybe had 300K, and it was enormous for its time. There are only a few other ancient cities of comparable size at all.

That's where Rome's real success lay: not in conquest but in civil planning and construction. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record in this blog space, going on about how people focused on war as the key part of history bugs me. (Maggie jokes sometimes that she is worried I'll start buying Grateful Dead shirts and growing a ponytail.) It's not about hating war, though. It's about acknowledging that what we build and how we build it is, ultimately, the most important legacy of a society.

Eisenhower's greatest accomplishment as President? The Interstate Highway System. What do we remember about the Egyptians? The pyramids. If you look at any society from more than a couple decades or so, what part of it lasts? Their construction.

The aqueducts have stood for millennia. I rest my case.

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Photo: Diego Delso, delso,photo, License CC-BY-SA

The Yard Ramp Guy Blog: A Stadium View

This week, my friend The Yard Ramp Guy, without bragging (not his style), highlights yard ramp placement with high-profile sports teams and what he calls "service without complaint, needing virtually no maintenance, and readily repositioned to be placed into and out of service when needed." Bravo, I say.

Click HERE to read all about it.

Inventing the Hyperloop

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The way I figure it, most billionaires are just investors: they’re simply using money to make more money. It’s not real exciting, but if you really want to be rich that bad, I guess it works.

A few billionaires are more interesting to me, though—guys like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who actually get involved in producing new things.

Elon Musk is especially noteworthy right now. He’s started a private space corporation (SpaceX), co-founded Tesla Motors, and most recently is pushing for the Hyperloop.

The Hyperloop

The Hyperloop

The Hyperloop is a conceptual transportation system that would be able to move passengers at speeds twice, or more, of a passenger aircraft. Essentially, it’s a high speed train in a sealed tunnel with most of the air pumped out, letting it speed unhindered by air resistance, track friction, weather, or any of the difficulties facing other modes of high-speed transportation.

This thing could potentially hit thousands of miles an hour (depending on how low they can keep the pressure in the tube; that’s the big limiting factor). Rather than using maglev (magnetic levitation) or wheels, the train would float on air rails, very similarly to how an air hockey table works, and it would be accelerated by linear induction motors.

This concept isn’t new. The idea of vacuum trains has been around for decades. This is one of the first attempts to really build one, though. While all of the initial design work was done by Musk’s engineers, he then took the unusual step of releasing all of the designs and plans. All of them. He turned it into an open source project.

Most of the current work on the project is by a group of engineers called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. (The old saw about engineers getting to name companies holds true here).

That’s not to say that it doesn’t face plenty of troubles of its own. They’ve still got to figure out how to handle earthquakes, any number of technical issues, and even zoning issues. But I feel confident saying that we’ll get to see this fly one day.