PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
the overall mileage length by one to two orders of magnitude. Most canals
are still around today, but other uses have become fashionable,
such as leisure activities, transport of low-value goods, and irrigation.
The situation is similar in the case of sea transport. Nakicenovic points
out that there are more sails fabricated for sailboats today than in the
days of ocean clippers, but most of them are used for pleasure and they
do not contribute to the transportation of a single commercial tonmile.
Ten Years Later
The little circles in Appendix C Figure 7.1 show a deviation
between the trajectories predicted fifteen years ago and
what happened since then. The railway share deviates relatively
little (notice non-linear vertical scale). But airways
deviate more. Air routes grew less than expected, and that results
in the highway share remaining practically flat, whereas a
decline had been predicted. Is transportation by road displaying
an unnatural staying power, or is aviation falling behind in
its natural evolution?
The substitution model puts the blame on air routes, but
that is because of the way the model works (that is, it calculates
the share of highways as 100 percent minus the shares of
airways and railroads). However, there are also commonsense
arguments in favor of this interpretation. First is the
well-known fact that Americans have been giving up the car
for the airplane (we will see in Chapter Nine that this
substitution began in 1960.) Second is the fact that little
progress has been made in commercial aviation over the last
40 years. Passenger jets have not changed appreciably in
terms of speed since Boeing introduced the 707 in the 1950’s.
An innovative step in aviation technology is overdue, and the
delay is most likely due to the amount of innovation involved.
An airplane fueled by a liquefied gas (see energy substitution
below) would be a very different “species” from the airplanes
we have been accustomed to.
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