#MetaLoop
Or How We Can connect “Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once,” Stop Worrying about our Cities, help Regenerate Gaia, and Love the Three Most Precious Things We Have:
Our Time, our Health & the Planet (while helping Melbourne — and your own favourite City; regain its “World’s Most Livable City” crown and Sydney stay in the race!)
An Ecomimetic, Express A to B that complements the car and suburbs, improves on the Boring Company urban congestion-busting model, with public-private partnership distributed personal, mass rapid transit, being far cheaper, faster and less disruptive to build and maintain; while generating 5 revenue streams for PPP-surplus spending on key Doughnut Economy environmental and social priorities.
“The Station Comes to You…along a new renewables-dedicated, optimally distributed, fractal geometry, integrated people, food, goods, data and green electrons-moving single-platform Song line-emulating network…
…via a biomimetic, multi-modal urban flow-distribution, rapid transit-green electricity transmission & storage mobility machine to de-carbonise, de-congest, de-pollute, de-heat, de-idle, de-hazard & re-justice our Cities by igniting a productivity and wellbeing revolution, ASAP.”
“Good Design is the Complex rendered Simply, via #SynPlexity”
“Life is Always Right…”
Le Corbusier (via Simon Alford, RIBA President 2022)
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0
As published in Fifth Estate, and shared at #SmartEnergy2021 in Sydney, and now also discussed with numerous fellow attendees including lawmakers, at Parliament House Canberra, Australia at the Australia Institute’s Revenue Summit 2022, and Climate Integrity Summit 2023, we present a Songline-emulating, 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 & Virtual Power Plant prosumer concept, as a proposed specialist consultant-led Feasibility Study for Premium Serially Shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles (SAEVs); as an optimal Desire Line for the Fourth Industrial Revolution that ignites a Productivity and Revenue renaissance as suumarised in this Executive Summary, that exemplifies the vital, balanced environmental-social priorities of the Doughnut Economy — #MetaLoop.
So how do we learn for Norway’s Future Fund and tap the Super Profits of the Fossil Fuel industry for the collective good?
Rather than fritter the windfalls of the Oil, Coal & Gas boom (as Thatcher did in the UK for North Sea Gas), with the failed hoax of trickle-down economics tax cuts (particularly) for the wealthy; why not emulate the Norwegians and invest in free childcare, universities, health care and the like, and in our EV fleets — for social justice and cohesion, health, well-being and happiness?
Such an Australian Future Fund sourcing meaningful Minerals Resources taxes and Carbon pricing, coupled with Green Bonds, can help fund new infrastructure like MetaLoop.
Last week, The Australia Institute’s Canberra Revenue Summit consensus was that the capital investment into infrastructure that boosted productivity has multiplier effects, that cascade into the economy, further enhancing the economic and societal benefits.
The Captured Value of new Mobility technology (first aired in the Henry Report on Australia’s Future Tax System) is now a reality, meaning a MetaLoop network generates revenues-value on multiple, synergised, compounding unique value proposition fronts:
- Micro-levies on the fares of paying commuters, who accept a premium for “station comes to you” seamless, express A-B, private, safe urban mobility
- General road-usage tolls (to replace the fuel-excise tax), that allows CBDs to recover fully from the average 30% declines in office occupancy and consequent market values since Covid
- Productivity and well-being, physical and mental health gains for individuals, stakeholders and for the economy as consumer-commuters optimise their work-life balances by minimising commuting time, while maximising work time thanks to being able to work while in transit
- These SynPlexity benefits represent billions of dollars of additional value to the Australian economy by making our existing infrastructure (with 4th Industrial Revolution enhancements), work harder and better for us with Productivity gains, and by generating new export revenues from a National Reconstruction Fund/Net Zero Authority/Future Made in Australia-enabled new CleanTech manufacturing base along the lines of the now defunct Car industry initiated by the post-WWII Chiefly Labor government.
- This CAPEX vrs OPREV dynamic means the ROI of MetaLoop is highly favourable, especially considering the above revenues and values are all integrated into the first one of five actual revenue streams (Micro-Fares-Tolls for People-Goods transport-delivery, Energy generation-transmission-VPPs, AgriTech Food growth-delivery, Big Data sales, Advertising).
It addresses several wicked-problems, while being also potentially green-bond financed (with timely ROI, in swiftly paying for itself with 5 revenue-streams and IP-licencing of the ML network infrastructure poles, bridges and pods manufacturing to lower unit labour cost markets); 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 via optimal, biomimetic, fractal flow distribution geometries.
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.
It also strives to incorporate Circular, Regenerative Economy principles in recycling and upcycling the waste of our cities back into them via the physical embodiment of materials used in the MetaLoop superstructure.
It’s as circular as possible, so for example, we envisage using recycled ocean plastic for the bridge walkways and cycleway surfaces, within the MetaPod PRT vehicles used, in various fixtures and fittings like railings and light diffusers, et al; and recycled steel & aluminum, plus engineered timber - for the biomimetic, Frei Otto-informed superstructure bridges and poles that carry the transiting people, goods, data and green energy that MetaLoop optimally transports.
This Asynsis MetaLoop green urban transit vision which we’ve been advocating and publishing since at least 2017, most recently proposed for Aerotropolis, Sydney in February 2023; is being simultaneously developed in parallel (or at least similar versions — with potential imitation being the best form of flattery indeed), by other designers like BIG, for the more recent, Telosa project, and so is demonstrably getting closer to fruition by the day.
A key point of distinction being that MetaLoop’s lead ideator, the author, Nigel Reading, delivers the only such vision backed by the practical ARUP experience of delivering the London Overground GingerLine mass transit reference design (now built and fully operational), an urban transit concept which also exemplifies a TED-spread, first geometric principles, physics-informed, design theory of everything.
The above MetaPod concept design example is taken with acknowledgment from Aptera, while we suggest future operating models could be manufactured by various legacy Car manufacturers (to help them diversify and preserve market share), or by new mobility startups like Aptera or Zoox, according to the technical engineering specifications required to operate on the network.
This would encourage competition and provide a variety of models for the mobility commuter to choose from, with commensurate pricing bands.
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, aligning with Hexagon.
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, Group of 8 University Mobility-AV-EV-AI Robotics Lab, Cleantech Incubator-Accelerator, Blockchain Energy Trading-VPP and Capital Investment partners involvement subject to active public-private-partnership negotiation with various government commissioning authorities.
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 in the United State 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.
Just as Rewiring America (& now Rewiring Australia too), rightly seeks to Electrify our Homes & Businesses, MetaLoop aims for the same urban-scale transformation for our entire Cities & Towns, including in Commuter Transit, Food Production and Energy & Data Generation-Transmission-Storage.
This will ensure a truly comprehensive and integrated transformation of our economies to a fully Net Zero, higher-Productivity regime, while creating a new re-shored, CleanTech Manufacturing Base — with all the implications for ensuring a secure pipeline of good quality, well-paying Jobs & Economic growth for our economies.
In Australia, we suggest a MetaLoop roll-out can best be integrated as a key platform for the National Reconstruction Fund (designed to rebuild our manufacturing infrastructure base, particularly in Clean Tech & Green Energy, with Transport & Housing also being key), and be coordinated with the nascent National Net Zero Authority, responsible for sustainably managing the energy transition with minimal disruption to both labour & capital.
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.
There are also synergies with Defense in Australia, where AUKUS, the new pact between the US, UK & Australia, can therefore benefit from both MetaLoop & Kati Thanda schemes as a new Clean Tech AUKUS Pillar Three, to help pump-prime/front-end the enhanced industrial capabilities & skilled manufacturing and services workforces required for advanced national defense thechnologies.
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).
“Hannah Arendt described fascism as the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob, and the only thing that ever defeated that was the temporary alliance of the centre and the left — and that’s what we need.”
Paul Mason
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, racist insurrection and effective neo-fascist coup attempt in the very nation that spent so much blood and treasure as the arsenal of democracy, 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 (and the Developed West in general), 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 in the US case, 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.
Go back to that first underground railway.
London not only permitted eight years of construction through one of the most crowded districts in the city, but it also established a
public–private partnership and invested £200,000.
“Those who devised and carried out this undertaking
would be entitled to the highest praise and gratitude
of the people,” noted one speaker at the ceremony
to commemorate the opening.
“This line was not only an honor to the country,
but a solid advance in civilization.”
True enough then — and, perhaps, it will
be true again in the future.
McKinsey, The Road To Seamless Mobility — Conclusion
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.
As shared on Twitter
https://twitter.com/ASYNSIS/status/1526378512768471040
Mass transit, over the river along a narrow valley.
What MetaLoop does is use existing roads and rail routes as “urban valleys”, utilising the unused Z-axis — Overground, for personal mass-transit, as an optimal hybrid between the private and public domains.
Where the “Station Comes to You” and your dedicated trip is Express, with no Stops, Stations, Traffic Lights…just seamless Personalised Rapid Transit, allowing you more congestion-busting Time for your work or personal use, more quality time with colleagues, family and friends; yielding substantial, verifiable Well-being and Productivity benefits for both Individuals and Society, with collateral Political-Economic application benefits, thanks to the MetaLoop Public Private Partnership revenue-sharing, surplus-recycling, Doughnut/Circular Economy operating model.
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 (thanks to its integrated rain water collection canopies above the MetaPod rails) — 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.
The water collected at source can then be used for domestic, commercial and urban farming purposes.
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, as well as integrating suburban homes with rooftop solar, into precinct-wide microgrids right across MetaLoop urban networks.
So MetaPods could also act, like other private EVs, as mobile batteries with bi-directional charging points at every home.
Prefabricated modular social & affordable housing units along MetaLoop routes, particularly above currently often-moribund high streets, will help repopulate & revitalise declining neighbourhoods, address a growing housing crisis in many cities, while generating new retail, bioponic vertical-urban farming (imagine all those CBD multi-story carparks converted to urban farms, cafe-bars & restaurants), and F&B activity along newly car traffic-curtailed, semi-pedestrianised streets.
To address the current affordable housing rental crisis, future revenues (eg: via Covered Bonds) from the MetaLoop PPP operating model can be pre-emptively channeled into funding the supply of new housing right now, either built by local councils, incentivised private developers or housing association-NGOs like Nightingale Housing.
And how do we also preserve (Sub)Urban House Prices when Remote Working, AI & Working Population Decline starts eroding property values?
The utility-scale renewable power to run MetaLoop (and service the many commercial and domestic customers en route with cheaper, cleaner energy), as a new stand-alone Green Power grid 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 branching & fanning out above largely existing transport arteries, from the various city CBDs.
So this strategy delivers cheaper & greener energy to our cites faster and more easily with less disruption (with a brand new, stand-alone green-dedicated 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 transmission infrastructure investment and roll-out).
This is the killer app of MetaLoop, saving us City-dwellers those most precious commodities of all — our quality time, health & energy, 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 — all while alos providing you with green, clean energy.
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”:
