The Great Transportation Transition
01.27.2006 by Brian Mulconrey

Thursday, August 18, 2022 � What were the long term forces that drove the transformation of our global transportation infrastructure during the first two decades of the 21st century? Competition for unpredictable global oil supplies was certainly a big part of the story, but a narrow focus on oil misses some of the bigger actors in this story. Even global climate change played a smaller role in the transition than many care to acknowledge.

At the turn of the century audio conferencing (a relatively small market for most of the late 20th century) exploded in popularity. This transition was fueled by the growth in email adoption in the late 1990's and data transmission rates that, while puny by today's standards, allowed for the rapid transmission of meeting materials over the Internet. It started to become commonplace for teams to be located around the world while still staying in close contact. This was only the beginning.

Widespread concerns over natural and unnatural disasters disrupting commerce motivated a wave of companies to expand the categories of employees that worked remote one or more days a week in order to help assure that remote workers could maintain operations during a disaster. Several countries developed tax and other incentives to encourage remote work. Between the oil shocks of 2006 and 2011, increases in worker "Remote Days" were credited with saving over a billion barrels of oil annually in the United States alone while preparing companies to react with more agility to a crisis. The growth in Remote Days also fueled investment in improved videoconferencing interfaces. Today's Virtual Spaces technology is a direct result of these pioneering baby steps.

Twenty years ago we climbed behind the wheel of two ton vehicles to drive to video stores and rent DVD recordings. This image strikes us as ridiculous today, but it didn't seem humorous at all at the time. While high speed digital media delivery rendered the DVD obsolete, it wasn't until the early twenty teens that we began paying serious attention to driving down the weight of our transportation infrastructure.

Most of today's RTVs (robotic transport vehicles) are just a little larger than their contents. As we watch them zip down the RTV Lanes on our highways, it can be easy to forget that they represent much more than a milestone in transportation technology. In just the past ten years, the global spread of these unmanned vehicles for transporting our stuff combined with reductions in traditional commuting have cut global traffic fatalities by over 100,000 lives annually. And, thanks to the nano-engineered solar collectors and fuel cells, these vehicles tap into both abundant solar power and the convenience of hydrogen energy storage. Of course the transition of most manufactured products to small scale local production has also helped a great deal in reducing the amount of "stuff" that we need to move around the planet.

The combination of RTVs, Virtual Retail Spaces, and integrated digital entertainment programming redefined the ancient art of "shopping" in the second decade of the 21st century while bringing sophisticated retail experiences to every corner of the world. These technologies also launched the reinvention of the 20th century supply chain with the 2017 introduction of Triple M (Mobilie Manufacturing Modules) mini-factories that break apart, transport themselves via RTVs to new locations, and auto reassemble in response to changes in global demand patterns.

"Winning the Oil End Game," a pioneering manifesto published by Amory Lovins in 2005, outlined most of the strategies ultimately adopted for driving both a new energy paradigm and the business logic that accelerated the development of RTV infrastructure. But perhaps the most fascinating alchemy of the past 10 years has been the co-evolution of Virtual Spaces and RTV technology. We have literally rewritten the definition of "being there."

� 2006 - All Rights Reserved.