Avoiding Megacities’ Standstill

Abstract

The world is going through a massive urbanization process with the consequence that for the first time in history physical mobility is regressing. Megacities are already on the verge of coming to a standstill and will only get worse as the number of cars should grow to 1.7 billion, 20 years from now. Just imagine, by 2025, 630 million inhabitants will be living in 37 megacities throughout the world. 35 years from now being 1.2 billion inhabitants will be living in one of these newly formed megacities regrouping several urban areas, reaching a staggering 40–50 million inhabitants. Complete traffic standstill will become the norm if nothing is done. Unfortunately, there are no easy or cheap solutions to solve the megacities’ current transportation problems and the future of mobility looks even bleaker. Under the forces of horizontal growth due to urban sprawl and vertical expansion caused by higher housing densification, these cities aren’t just exploding. In fact, they are imploding, with the consequence that transportation solutions need either to contemplate building underground networks, which is extremely time-consuming and expensive, or “appropriating” large land surfaces and “disappropriating” large residential areas, solutions which are legally difficult and socially explosive. To understand what the potential solutions to enhance roads, bus lanes, and metro network capacity are, we will present simple models. Some of the parameters influencing this capacity, such as vehicle occupancy, average operational speed, fleet size, and headway will be explained in detail. This information will allow, for instance, the readers to understand how many cars can run on a highway during 1 h and what are the features affecting the roads’ throughput. An entire section is dedicated to bus rapid transit systems, an urban transport mode which is still not well known by people but that can seriously compete with heavy metro operations in terms of capacity. Limitations of such system in megacities will also be presented. A complete view of the technologies and concept influencing mass transit capacity will give a complete picture of the various transport modes capacity. Furthermore, it will provide a direct throughput comparison between these various modes using the passenger per hour and per direction (PPHPD) measure, based on current technologies. What this section will also do, and in our view is unique, is that it will calculate the new driverless technologies’ impact on capacity for all three transport modes. This analysis will feature new concepts, such as car platooning and higher occupancy resulting from a fleet of unmanned taxis using a multi-point to multi-point transport model, that new internet Apps will be able to provide. It will show that such solutions could provide the same medium transport capacity as bus and light train operations and thus provide an effective and cheap way of avoiding megacities’ immobility.