Thursday, July 31, 2008

Hope for America

Reading a daily newspaper or watching the news would make one think the number one problem in the world is terrorism, but there are far greater risks to Americans doing day-to-day activities than that. One of our chief risks is the transportation system. We would have to have ten 9/11 events every single year to kill as many as the over 40,000 each year that die on the nations highways. Furthermore, our transportation system is almost 100% dependent upon the use of fossil fuels with their associated geopolitical and environmental baggage. There is a good solution to this, however, an automated national personal transit system. During the coming months my aim in this blog is to show; why building such a system makes sense, how it is technologically feasible today, how to go about overcoming the current transportation paradigm, why other utilities (especially the electric and fiber optics grids) should be upgraded by incorporation into the system, how to organize the management of the system, and a cost/benefit analysis. These ideas are to be bandied about here to be organized and put into a book within the next year (by Aug 2009), I hope, so if you are sharing proprietary information please state such, so it doesn't end up being published by mistake. The ultimate goal would be to actually see the system built but there must be intermediary steps along the way to fully vet the ideas and to educate people and get them to support it before any movement towards that will happen. This, I hope, is the first step in an ambitious journey that has potential to better all of our lives.