THE WIDER ANGLE. The brave new world of transportation

When it comes to bicycling, there’s never been any doubt the Dutch are world champions. Whether rain or shine (actually mainly rain — the Netherlands has an average 235 days of annual precipitation), nearly half the population take to their bikes regularly. Many pedal upwards of 1,000 miles a year in the famously flat, low-lying country.

In fact, biking is so popular the Dutch now face a new menace on their roads. Too many cycles — some of them, using electric pedal-power — are causing traffic jams in bike lanes. Worse, cycle deaths have overtaken car deaths in the Netherlands. Some 206 cyclists were killed there in 2017 while 201 people lost their lives in cars. E-bikes are being blamed for the spike in fatalities, especially among older cyclists who are unable to handle the extra speed of electric bikes and lose control.

Cross now to Paris now which pioneered bike-sharing over a decade ago. There, two US electric-scooter companies, Lime and Bird, are launching e-scooters and seeking to woo ultra-short-distance commuters who aren’t afraid of jumping onto a vehicle that’s only just graduated from being a child’s toy. The arch-rivals, part of a growing band of e-scooter start-ups that assert they’re solving the “last-mile” transportation problem, are hoping to replicate in Europe the electric-scooter rental mania sweeping the US. Lime just carried out a limited experiment in Geneva and aims to launch in 25 European cities, part of an overall target of reaching 125 markets globally by year end. It kicked off by placing a few hundred of its app-based powered scooters on the Paris pavements last week.

Even Indian companies are looking to cash in on the two-wheeler boom. Hero Cycles, for instance has just launched its e-bike, Lectro EZephyr, designed at its Manchester-based Hero Global Design Center. The EZephyr is equipped with a throttle to give it scooty-like convenience and Hero is looking at producing 10-12 e-bike models . The company’s looking at tie-ups with local players in Japan, Germany and Taiwan and its UK subsidiary, Avocet, will also launch the new models in September.

It’s clear we’re on the verge of an urban transportation revolution that could reshape the bursting-at-the-seams cities that we live in and definitively change how people get around. It’s reckoned that by 2050 another 2.5 billion inhabitants will crowd into the world’s cities, making current transportation options woefully inadequate.

Disruptive modes

Huge money is being poured into the transportation systems that are competing for space on the road and even building their own tubes or tunnels that will allow super-fast transit at hitherto undreamt of land speeds. These disruptive transportation modes range at the lower end from electric scooters to electrically-powered cycles that offer optional extra pedal-power oomph.

At the other end of the transportation spectrum, there’s Elon Musk’s Boring Company which promises to transport vehicles on pods at speeds of up to 150mph, and which has just won a contract to build a tunnel from Chicago’s O'Hare Airport to the city's Downtown Loop area. Four companies bid for the contract, but Musk won easily because he didn’t want any city funding. He says he will recoup the cost of building the tunnel from tolls.

The transportation system that has caught the eye of India’s planners is the Hyperloop, which is now being built by companies like Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One. Branson’s company has already signed a deal with Maharashtra to build a tunnel that will take passengers between the two cities in 25 minutes flat in magnetically propelled ground shuttles inside a vacuum tube. The line is also looking at connecting Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport and the yet-to-be-built Navi Mumbai airport. Maharashtra government officials say they could have Mumbai-Pune up and running by around 2025 but even that’s reckoned by others to be optimistic.

There are more ambitious timetables being drawn up in other parts of the world. Dubai is looking at a Hyperloop system that will make the trip to nearby Abu Dhabi a 12-minute affair. And the South Koreans want Hyperloop TT to have a 200-km hyperloop system in place in four years between Seoul and Busan. Even more ambitiously, by 2020 Hyperloop TT is looking at running a service all the way from Vienna to Bratislava in Slovakia and on to Budapest. The current one-hour journey from Vienna to Bratislava will take all of 10 minutes. Hyperloop TT has also signed an agreement with Ukraine.

Much closer home, Hyperloop TT has also made a pre-feasibility study and presented it to the Andhra Pradesh government for a Hyperloop system that will connect the new capital of Amravati and Vijayawada. At a later stage, the project could be extended all the way to Vishakapatnam. A feasibility study for the project will be completed in six to eight months, says HTT Chairman and Co-founder, Bibop Gresta. About the costs, he says: “The pre-feasibility study has shown costs are lower than the high-speed rail in India.”

The amazing part of all this is that while the Hyperloop companies have carried out tests on short stretches, they haven’t actually put any people into high-speed pods yet. They’re confidently predicting it won’t be difficult to do because the technology’s very similar to the one used by maglev trains using magnetic levitation that have long been in existence in Japan, South Korea and China.

Still, safety issues remain immense and engineering challenges are major. The Hyperloop will be working in a vacuum inside a tunnel and will be able to hit speeds of around 1,200kmph -- twice the speed of maglev transport systems. Costs are also a factor that might stall these projects because hyperloop transportation systems have to move in straight lines. In India that might pose problems of land acquisition. And underground tunnels would push up costs hugely.

At the other end of the spectrum, with e-scooters and low-power electric mopeds, costs and technology aren’t a factor. But that doesn’t mean they’re any easier to turn into winning financial propositions. E-scooters particularly have had met with hostile public receptions. In San Francisco, for instance, the e-scooter phenomenon has been called the Scooterapocalypse. Hero Cycles is firmly convinced that e-bikes will prevail over scooters. The company points out that 2 million e-bikes are selling in Europe annually.

Where does India fit into all this? Indian roads are notoriously unfriendly to cyclists and all smaller vehicles. And the Hyperloop must first conduct safety tests with human passengers. A brave new transportation world is dawning globally — but there’s a lot still to be figured out.

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