Early Indications May 2019: The Next Infrastructure

If we look ahead into the medium term, to 2025 or 2030, there could be some subtle  but significant changes to US infrastructure to cope with the implications of several  emerging technologies. Many of these may be emerging in quiet locations, but if one  knows where to look, the landscape might be changing before our eyes. Let’s start with telecommunications, much of which is a matter of access. When you  look at the world’s nations ranked by land mass, it’s easy to neglect how vast Russia  is, even downsized from the former USSR: it’s twice as big as the #5 nation (Brazil).  Also, I was surprised to see that both Canada and the US are larger than China.  India, despite its massive population, is only 1/5 as large as Russia and about 1/3  the size of the US. The US total is deceiving: about 400,000 square kilometers are  water, and Alaska counts for about 1/6 of the #3-ranking total.  Why does this matter, apart from trivia night? Connecting people into the Internet is  expensive, difficult, and complicated. Rural broadband is emerging as a hot political  topic here in Pennsylvania: the state defines “broadband” as a measly 1.4 Mbps (the  FCC definition is 25), and many people can’t get that except by expensive and  unreliable satellite coverage. By way of comparison, Finland has established  broadband access as a right of citizenship, with the goal of getting every citizen  access to _at least_ a 100 Mbps connection by 2025.  A few hundred miles to Pennsylvania’s southwest, Kentucky shares our  prevalence of sparsely populated areas featuring rugged terrain. A statewide project  known as KentuckyWired that launched in late 2014 aimed to address the digital  divide: Kentucky is fifth worst in the US in high-speed Internet use and not  coincidentally fifth poorest as measured by median household income. To fund the  buildout, the state engaged an Australian bank with a long history of infrastructure  projects. In the five years since the deal was signed, construction progress is far  behind schedule and the complexity of the debt covenants is kicking in: the state  auditor estimates KentuckyWired will now cost $1.5 billion over the next 30 years,  or 50 times the original proposal. (ProPublica’s reporting in conjunction with the  Louisville Journal-Courier is detailed and dispiriting. ) This situation is common in the US: Take away the metroplexes (146 densely  populated counties) that are home to half of the population, and the other half is  scattered across the remaining 95% of counties. Cell coverage can be spotty in  these locales, which makes the prospect of 5G wireless broadband unlikely, given  the expensive necessity of more cells for the smaller coverage footprint of the new  technology. Whether for wired or wireless access, something as seemingly simple  as a telephone pole can be legally complicated, financially costly, and logistically  tricky to maintain: at our local airport I’ve seen helicopters that lower saws in flight  to cut away brush and branches from otherwise inaccessible wires. Absent Internet connectivity, millions of people can’t see doctors, access learning  materials, or work remotely. As robotics, telemedia, and Internet of Things  applications increase in importance, these citizens will fall still farther behind their  better-connected counterparts, both in the US and abroad. At some point, focused  effort on a national scale will be required to update the communications infrastructure.  This will happen as bridges and roads continue to crumble, and as the generation of  federal, state, and local workers who began to join public payrolls in the 1960s  continues to retire. Oh, and Social Security is due to run out of money in 2034.  Funding broadband will not be a simple matter in any state. Let’s turn from flyover zones to cities. Here, the combination of crushing population  density, demographic trends, and technology change will bring a very different set of  scenarios. Given the recent IPOs of Lyft and Uber, let’s start with cars. It’s currently  unclear what autonomous vehicles will do for traffic: some studies predict  increased delays while others foresee improvement. In any event, it would seem  intuitive to predict that the need for parking will drop, to take only one aspect of change.  The coexistence of cars (autonomous or human-driven) and bicycles will require new  urban designs, assumptions, and attitudes; infrastructure cannot be built in isolation,  as New York would seem to prove. No city in the US appears to be rethinking the role  of cars in the city core, apart from a congestion pricing experiment about to launch  in New York. I was in a meeting earlier this month where logistics experts discussed the future of  food. Meal delivery appears to be resonating with large audiences, which raises the  issue of where all that food will be prepared. Fast-food outlets are in much the same  situation as Macy’s stores attempting to implement omnichannel logistics: neither the  retailer nor the food franchises were built to support delivery of product to customers  off the store premises. Kitchens at McDonalds are already coping with more menu  options including salads and parfaits along with all-day breakfast; where and how  should UberEats and Grubhub customers be serviced in the existing kitchen and  cashier architecture? What should the new design seek to optimize? Some restaurants are pulling out of the delivery business, or are opting for branded  drivers rather than contractors who may or may not represent the restaurant with its  desired courtesy, promptness, and attention to detail. Dominos has long wrestled with  the dilemma of drivers who speed or otherwise poorly represent the company, and  there are no easy answers. The UberEats driver is a contractor to a contractor, so  allegiance is a fluid proposition: most Lyft drivers are also signed up with Uber, and  UberEats delivers for many restaurants. There’s a lot of room for competing priorities  in such a labor pool. Assuming the driver quality issue can be addressed, possibly by better pay, the kitchen  situation remains problematic. Around the world, multiple startups are launching  so-called ghost or cloud kitchens. These kitchens are commissaries that serve multiple  ethnic formats from a common infrastructure that has no visible presence or dining (or  carryout) area. Uber’s co-founder Travis Kalanick is involved with a firm called  Cloudkitchens that only services meal delivery firms. SoftBank’s Vision Fund has  invested $357 million in Zume Pizza, which uses robotics to prepare pizza for  delivery en route to the customer. On a smaller scale but already in market, Good Uncle is a food delivery startup  aimed at college students. Like Zume, it cooks pizzas en route to the customer,  which improves both speed and quality, but the service is also working on an  aggregated delivery model: rather than stop at every house or apartment that  has ordered food, it delivers at visible, logical campus locations. Right now the  service is operating in Bethlehem, PA, College Park, MD, and Hamilton and  Syracuse, NY. The talent behind the food includes chefs from Michelin- tar restaurants, and the service is in some cases replacing the student dining hall.  Good Uncle delivers groceries as well as cooked meals, does not add delivery  charges, and offers daily discounts, presumably to cut down on food waste of  slow-selling perishable items. Speaking of delivery, infrastructure will need to evolve to address the Amazon  issue of how to manage the last 50 feet. For apartment buildings without a  doorman or similar attendant, for free-standing houses with visible porches,  and for gig workers who might operate out of a Starbucks or other temporary  space, the delivery model (especially for frequently ordered items such as groceries)  doesn’t scale: UPS can’t keep coming back day after day if nobody will ever be  home during business hours. At the local FedEx ground location where I pick up  wine shipments that require an in-person signature, I was told that mine was one  of up to 50 such shipments per day; the holding room for packages sometimes  overflows into the main store. As autonomous vehicles reset the economics of automobile ownership, what happens  to tens of millions of US garages? At the same time, where will urban dwellers without  a garage charge electric cars at night? Will parking meters need to be rewired to include  high-voltage chargers? As the nature of the car and its relation to the city change,  everything from carry-out windows to parking lots to domestic architecture will change  in response. Will garage-door openers selectively allow access to deliveries, and will  refrigerators become commonplace in these post-garage spaces? The days of the  foyer, ice-delivery boxes, and milk boxes on porches may be circling back.  Will we see more use of e-bicycles that function like small pickup trucks? If so,  how will laws, norms, and space co-evolve? What will constitute a “bike lane”  for such chunky vehicles? All told, changes in connectivity, whether 5G or rural broadband, will bring with  them implications for how people get around, especially in relation to what the tech  analyst Horace Dediu calls “micromobility” centered around scooters, bicycles, and  related technologies. As old as the bicycle may be, it remains a wonder of technological  efficiency and with changes to batteries, motors, GPS, and other emerging technologies,  the mid-21st century could mark a new blossoming of interest and innovation. If Dediu is  right, and I believe he is, then many parts of the world will look very different (read: more  like Amsterdam) in a decade or two.