PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
It was mentioned earlier that car populations saturated their niche in
society for most European countries, Japan and, the United States by the
end of the twentieth century. As for the construction of paved roads and
highways, the main effort is in maintaining and improving what already
exists rather than adding more. Road construction in the United States
enjoyed a surprising comeback in the early 1980s, but should now
cease. Contrary to popular belief, paved roads “diffused” into society
before cars; they reached the 90 percent level about a decade earlier,
despite the fact that all these processes merged together as they saturated.
In general, one could say that society has achieved the capacity that
satisfies its needs for this means of transportation and is reluctant to invest
further. We are at the end of the era in which people were
preoccupied by the automobile. After all, air travel has been gaining
importance relative to road travel ever since 1960, when the latter enjoyed
the lion’s share of the transportation market (see Chapter Seven).
In 1960 the automobile was at its zenith. In the division of U.S.
intercity passenger traffic among trains, cars, and airplanes, shown in
Figure 9.1, the percentage of traffic attributed to trains (buses were included
in this category) has been systematically declining, while that of
airplanes has been rising. The share of cars rose until 1960, reaching
close to 90 percent, but then it began to decline. Cesare Marchetti believes
that the automobile, in spite of its dominant position at the time,
“felt” the rising threat of airplanes. 1 He whimsically adds that at the
moment when the automobile’s market share started declining, cars
were “masquerading themselves as airplanes with Mach 0.8 aerodynamics,
ailerons, tails, and ‘cockpit’ instrument panels. The competitor is
the devil—in this case the airplane—and as peasants still do in the Austrian
Alps, to scare the devil, one has to dress like the devil.”
————————————————————————————–
FIGURE 9.1 (next page) On the top we see the division among means of transportation
competing for intercity passenger traffic in the United States. The vertical scale
is logistic. The straight lines are extrapolations of fits on the data shown. The small
circles show what happened since 1988. On the bottom, a 1959 Cadillac Cyclone is
representative of car “behavior” at the moment when their dominance started being
challenged by airplanes. Adapted from work carried out at the International Institute
of Advanced Systems Analysis; photograph from General Motors.
200