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. |
Friday, May 17, 2019
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