MetaLoop — Or How We Can Stop Worrying and Love the Three Most Precious Things We Have: Our Time, Health & the Planet
“The Station Comes to You…along a new renewables-dedicated, optimally distributed, fractal geometry, integrated people and electrons-moving network…
…via a multi-modal urban flow-distribution, rapid transit machine to de-carbonise, de-congest, de-pollute, de-heat, de-idle, de-hazard & re-justice our Cities ASAP.”
“Good Design is the Complex rendered Simply, via #SynPlexity”
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As published in Fifth Estate, and shared at #SmartEnergy2021 in Sydney, Australia, we present a post-CoVid19 socially-distanced, Green New Deal, Single-Platform, Multi-Modal, Renewables-powered, Urban Light-Active-AV Transit & Farming, Biomimetic, City-optimising personal rapid transit Network concept, as a proposed specialist consultant-led Feasibility Study; as an optimal Desire Line for the Fourth Industrial Revolution — #MetaLoop.
It addresses several wicked-problems, while being green-bond financed (with timely ROI, in swiftly paying for itself with 5 revenue-streams); and enables many other societally-useful things in mitigating the UN-declared Climate Emergency to de-carbonise, de-congest, de-heat, de-idle & de-pollute our cities, most easily and rapidly.
This is because not only does it move people, goods and food most easily, it also moves green electrons as a new, stand-alone renewables-dedicated grid that will help mitigate current grid imbalances of curtailment, spillage and distributed storage by acting as an Actual meets Virtual Power Plant with blockchain energy trading to address the infamous “duck-curve” conundrum that is retarding the speedy uptake of renewable/non-fossil energy to exclusively power our cities, in meeting the COP26 NetZero 2050 challenge.
As shared with & by Mckinsey Mobility’s lead Mobility Consultant and Australia’s leading Renewable energy power purchasing agreement project manager, Jonathan Prendergast as an urban transit solution that best addresses several wicked problems at once.
Design Consultant partners: Asynsis Architecture + Design, Caldis Cook Group, Morrison Design Partnership, Erbas, Environmental Partnership, ihD, TILT, Buro Happold.
Research partners: University of New South Wales Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Built Environment faculties, Business Renewables Centre’s Monica Richter and the DesignThinkersGroup’s Mark Watson.
Leading global Mobility Manufacturer, Blockchain energy trading and Capital Investment partners involvement subject to active public-private-partnership negotiation.
With MIT-trained Professor Adrian Bejan of Duke University, discoverer of the Constructal law of design in nature and culture, Franklin Institute Laureate 2018, we further propose MetaLoop to the new Biden-Harris administration, since it makes perfect sense in terms of a long-term, sustained infrastructure roll-out, to continue and perpetuate the building retrofits, wind and solar required for America attaining Net Zero Carbon by 2050, as proposed in the Princeton NetZero America plan, as shared further into this post.
It’s also crucial in our view, to provide dignified well-paying jobs to the American working class — we’ve just seen the consequences of worsening inequality when a criminal sociopath, demagogue attempts to cynically leverage these divisions in US society to usurp the Constitution with attempted dictatorial powers.
So yes, hierarchy is natural and Constructal, but it must also be a mediated hierarchy to preserve social cohesion, (as we attempt to do in Australia, Canada, the EU-UK and Scandinavia — with a government-mediated market, to better effect than hitherto, in the US; which is still a neo-liberal, hyper-capitalist economy with minimal economic protections).
Due to automation, financialisation and globalisation-outsourcing, without adequate safety-nets and proactive redistributive policies, the US has inadvertently created all the pre-conditions for a far-right, nativist insurrection and effective fascist coup attempt in the very nation that spent so much blood and treasure defeating global fascism in WWII; a coup which alarmingly, so very nearly succeeded.
So MetaLoop can help re-balance the US economy, and temper its febrile politics; by becoming a fundamental nation-(re)building network of infrastructure, as an integral part of a sustained, long-term, continuous Keynsian, FDR — New Deal emulation, as a regenerative rollout that Electrifies America, most affordably and sustainably.
This then becomes a sustained long-term national infrastructure roll-out and continuous regeneration process as the transit networks are expanded; maintained and upgraded (with city & population growth seeded by “baby-bonus” programs and selective immigration as practiced by Australia), thereby ensuring continuous, long term economic growth, productivity gains, international competitiveness, well-paying union-secured jobs and the consequent benefits of the multi-cultural, political-economic stability, social cohesion and wellness of exemplary developed nations like Australia, Canada and in Scandinavia.
Other recommendations for paradigm-shifting new energy-transit infrastructure that will help America Build Back Better, Easier and for Longer (all Constructal principles); are innovations such as Focus Fusion in the new clean, distributed-energy space.
Also, a massive national rollout of intercity HyperLoops at the scale of the FDR-Eisenhower public infrastructure works and national highways-freeways of the 30s and 50s (with warpower, Arsenal of Democracy — Rewring America, emergency compulsory land purchase-order effectiveness to compete effectively with China, ,which routinely wields such state-powers to decisively and effectively build its freeways and bullet-train networks and deal with the twin Covid & Climate crises), all powered by renewables, is required.
When both the HyperLoop-MetaLoop networks are also renewables-powered, the former will do for inter-city travel, what MetaLoop can also do for intra-city commuting, while simultaneously solving several other urban design wicked-problems.
Wind and solar renewables are great but are almost “fix and forget”, so low employment-maintaining once operational (unlike coal mines and oil & gas wells or conventional factory floor vehicle manufacturing).
While the design and construction of MetaLoop networks connected to the wind and solar is longer term employment-generating and requires constant expansion, maintenance and upgrading of its modular infrastructure — so they are less susceptible to automation/outsourcing as much of the assembly is in situ in very different urban conditions across our cities, and can also be mandated to not be out-sourced overseas by regulation and/or PPP financing structures — as further covered in this blog post.
So it’s exactly the kind of infrastructure that America so urgently needs right now.
Now what is the MetaLoop proposition?
A Carbon-abating, Physically-distancing, Mobility App-Store that slashes Urban Emissions in the crucial Energy, Transport, Building and Agricultural sectors.
A means to ignite a Productivity & Competitiveness Cleantech 4th Industrial Revolution while also simultaneously de-Congesting and de-Carbonising our Civilisation by being the fastest possible point to point rapid personal transit system that mimics nature’s optimised, living flow systems.
Overall, the inexorable shift from simple digitization (the Third Industrial Revolution) to innovation based on combinations of technologies that respond to both supply and demand (the Fourth Industrial Revolution), is forcing companies to reexamine the way they do business.
Western Sydney Unliveable by 2050
“Just planting a number of trees will not solve the problem,” Professor Santamouris says.
“We need to have much more radical solutions.”
Now with the advent of the new US Biden-Harris administration, they plan to implement a massive Build Back Better — Green New Deal infrastructure program, which the likes of HyperLoop and MetaLoop networks can (looking at the industry sectors below), make crucial, substantial contributions to.
Here is Princeton Universities framework for achieving this ambitious, FDR-scale Keynsian agenda which the two charts immediately below come from:
The OECD refers to a MetaLoop-capable 5 Dimensional Build Back Better agenda to help the world recover from the twin Covid & Climate-induced economic crises we now face.
An Optimal City-Transforming, DeCongesting & DeCarbonising Solution that Tackles Numerous Wicked Problems in Demonstrating the Asynsis-Constructal #Form follows Flow Design ToE paradigm via a practical Light-Active-AV-EV, Socially-Distanced Transit, Renewables-powered, Urban Farming Multi-Modal transportation network that also gets you from an Urban A-B faster than any other Means.
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Scenario 3: Seamless mobility
Now for a third possibility: What if cities encourage the use of shared AVs through regulation and incentives? That would make it possible for residents to “mix and match” rail transit and low-cost, point-to-point autonomous travel in robo-taxis, autonomous shuttles, and autonomous buses easily.
Our analysis suggests that pooled AV shuttles could grab 25 percent of the market (twice as much as in the unconstrained-autonomy scenario), and private cars and privately used robo-taxis could provide about 30 percent of passenger-kilometers in 2030, compared with 35 percent for private cars today.
McKinsey predict up to 50% of all transit by 2030 could be by a MetaLoop-enabled system — and it could be even more with our light bridges over existing roads-rail lines, which means no traffic jams, traffic lights, bus and train queues to endure; because ML pods like the at-grade only Zoox, pick commuters up and drop them off door to door with a safe, private AV-EV trip, so the vast majority of most commutes are sailing non-stop, over existing road and rail routes.
The same logic applies to ML pods as drone delivery AVs, such as the at-grade only Nuro prototype.
Existing Metro Rail and Tram routes are largely radial, with diminishing returns as they get further out from City centres.
The key advantage of the more distributed and connected MetaLoop routes is that it’s more natural & fractal, multi-scale flow geometry with the greatest surface area coverage for the least resources-energy, which best mitigates the radial diminishing-returns effect as you travel further out from the central locus of the radial routes.
So MetaLoop confers the advantages of Private Vehicle privacy-personalisation, seamless point to point service, and full destinational choice (but without traffic jams and intersections that force stopping & delays); but also has the advantages of Public Transport in being most rapid, yet without the disadvantages of either, in that there are no stops nor stations, with virtually no queues.
An example of a public transit-only solution which is always in monorail mode (without the additional mode of AV pods ramping up & down from rail to ground, delivering at-grade A to B, seamless point to point transit — as MetaLoop does), is the revolutionary, congestion-busting Wuppertal hanging railway, built in 1902, which exists to this day.
So it’s the best of both, (Private & Public transport ), worlds, while having the optimal fractal structure for a fully integrated City Transit people and goods distribution network with numerous Urban Place-making opportunities such as the work of BAU, including for cafes, kiosks, parks, playgrounds, performance spaces, urban farming and biomes.
MetaLoop greenery can be rain-water autarkic — especially when the vegetated area is smaller than the area available for water collection.
So MetaLoop networks boost urban biodiversity, allow storage of storm-water for drought-periods, afford noise absorption through the plants, provide air purification, confer mental health benefits for urbanites (ever more important!), and provide grey-water utilisation/purification services to adjoining buildings through the greenery planter root systems.
Apartment buildings along Metaloop routes, such as the exemplary Nightingale apartment campuses in Melbourne, Adelaide & Sydney, could also act as Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), for their neighbourhoods if they became nodes for PPA utility scale renewable energy delivery from the Renewable Energy Zones (REZs), mushrooming up around our city peripheries.
That power would be delivered at high voltage from remote REZs to city-ringing mains lines and then via nodal transformers, stepped-down into conduited cables, integrated into the radial MetaLoop lines fanning out from the various city CBDs.
So delivering cheaper & greener energy to our cites faster and more easily (with a brand new, stand-alone green grid as part of the MetaLoop poles and bridges infrastructure ); than is otherwise possible with the piecemeal-upgrading of our existing poles and wires.
Each nodal MetaGrid could therefore also be revenue-generating for their subscriber-participants, allowing local battery storage and blockchain trading within & between neighbourhood VPP-microgrids, via the likes of PowerLedger to leverage the peaks and troughs of demand/supply and consequent pricing (while also solving the Duck Curve and Curtailment issues currently holding back further renewable energy infrastructure investment and roll-out).
This is the killer app of MetaLoop, saving us City-dwellers that most precious commodity of all — our quality time, and at a highly-affordable cost with minimal roll-out times and existing services and traffic disruption due to its modular prefabricated, above-ground nature.
Think of MetaLoop as “the station comes to you”, as the fastest possible A-B trip time, and as the best of both worlds; combining private car convenience and privacy with mass transit speed and efficiency.
It’s not just autonomous vehicles that would make the difference. Intelligent traffic systems, advanced rail signaling, and connectivity-enabled predictive maintenance would all boost network reliability. Seamless mobility could improve performance on all five indicators that characterize a transit system: availability, affordability, efficiency, convenience, and sustainability. It could accommodate up to 30 percent more passenger-kilometers (availability) while reducing average time per trip by 10 percent (efficiency). It could cost 25 to 35 percent less per trip (affordability), increase the number of point-to-point trips by 50 percent (convenience), and, if AVs are electric, lower GHG emissions by up to 85 percent (sustainability).
McKinsey, The Road To Seamless Mobility 2019
Reference Sources (MetaLoop: seamless mobility potential for 50% of Urban Transit by 2030) on McKinsey Seamless Mobility and World Economic Forum Fourth Industrial Revolution defined as the MetaLoop-exemplifying novel combination of existing and new technologies.
The key question then is, what would be more efficient for our cities — exclusively ceding this new transit & revenue stream created by AI, 5G & AVs only to the likes of Uber, Lyft & Tesla — or optimising city decongestion and decarbonising capability by building Public Private Partnership MetaLoop networks as exemplary Keynsian growth-catalysing projects where a state transit authority builds and runs the MetaLoop poles and bridges, while the likes of Tesla or Volkswagen build and operate the MetaPods?
Which will save more commuter time, generate more development value, increase economic productivity, while also supporting social cohesion and decarbonising our cities most quickly (following the Doughnut Economics model), thereby serving as ideal Green New Deal platforms that comprehensively address many of the key urban-design related UN Sustainable Development Goals, which best serve as performance metrics for our public-private stakeholders - as we (following the compelling science evidence and leadership), necessarily decarbonise our civilisation most swiftly and efficiently?
MetaLoop follows Constructal rules for optimal growth (from the Physics Of Life by Adrian Bejan):
Growth — “The snowflake has one kind of architecture… which is predictable provided that we recognize two principles: what flows (heat flows), and the natural tendency of all flows to configure and reconfigure themselves into architectures that provide easier access”.
The TED-Conferences-shared, Peer-reviewed, Published Constructal Physics-based Design Theory of Everything and Asynsis Design Practice (with Hong Kong Spin Example and HK EcoLivable City FB page); the “Talk behind the MetaLoop Walk”:
