The Future of Almost Everything, page 22
The greatest growth in travel will be within Asia, and in people from Asia visiting outside their own region. We will see a rapid increase in the number and size of regional airports, high-speed rail networks, and new roads.
Future of rail – high speed, long distance
Twenty-four nations have already built high-speed rail links, and the length of high-speed track is doubling every decade. At present 98% of all trains running faster than 195km/hour are found in Western Europe or East Asia (90% in China, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, UK and Spain combined), but high-speed rail will become more widespread.
In a decade, China built over 10,000km of high-speed track to become the world leader. Much of this was imported technology, with trains from companies like Siemens. However, the next wave of expansion will be almost entirely Chinese, and Chinese rail expertise will be exported globally.
Future investment in high-speed rail will be held back in Africa by unrest, in Russia by economics, in the UK by planning restrictions, in China as the backbone of a national service is completed, in Latin America by economic uncertainty, and in the US by a culture that prefers planes and cars.
Expect a boom in low-tech, rapid transport in cities, with automated ‘light railways’, or trams, or buses on special concrete tracks. These will be built rapidly, at relatively low cost, on pillars above streets, as tracks weave their way around cities.
Numbers of rail travellers will grow much faster in most countries than growth in capacity, so trains will become longer, double-decker, more crowded and more frequent.
Future of aviation and air travel
Expect boom-time for aviation – with short-term blips caused by recessions, regional conflicts, threat of viruses or other adverse events. The number of journeys each year has grown ten times over the last 40 years to over 3 billion. Expect this to increase to 6.4 billion by 2030.
Most growth of aviation will be in Asia, and least in Europe/North America. Europe will see huge growth in long-haul visitors arriving from Asia, particularly from China and India. Chinese tourists travelling outside their country will double to 200 million a year by 2020, and their spending on vacation will triple, especially on luxury goods.
Boeing is sitting on a backlog of orders for over 5,100 planes valued at around $400bn, while Airbus has orders to build 5,600 planes, worth even more. Engine-maker revenues alone will be more than $1 trillion over the next 20 years. Over 70% of engines today are made by GE or CFM, GE’s joint venture with Snecma in France, just another example of monumental scale in a globalised world.
Britain is the second-largest aerospace manufacturer after America, with 17% of the global market, and is home to 30% of Europe’s Eurospace firms – Rolls Royce engines are used in half of all the world’s new wide-bodied jets, BAE makes fighter jets and AgustaWestland makes helicopters.
While virtual working, video calls and other technologies will grow, they will not be enough to prevent growth in absolute terms of business travel, as I predicted a decade ago. Business budgets will be capped, however, or cut, forcing business travellers to hunt for bargain flights, flying economy as a general rule unless long haul.
Cheaper flights in real terms
The aviation industry was changed profoundly by new budget carriers, who completely re-invented the process of selling tickets, filling and emptying planes. Expect all major budget airlines to begin to offer premium features copied from traditional airlines, such as allocated seats, a free drink in-flight, free luggage allowances. This will attract increasing numbers of business travellers.
European budget airlines will carry more than 50% of all air passengers by 2030. As a result, all traditional airlines will be forced to radically alter how they work. Expect mergers of national carriers, and new global mergers.
Flying on less fuel – but most things look the same
New planes will become more efficient, and will fly with fewer empty seats. Flights will use less fuel per passenger because of smarter air traffic controls (including ‘free routing’ to allow pilots to fly directly from A to B, saving 10 minutes per flight on average), and shorter circling times around busy airports. Expect continuous GPS tracking of all commercial flights by 2018.
However, planes will look almost identical in 25 years’ time, because of fundamental limitations imposed by aerodynamics, passengers and freight-handling. Indeed, aviation has gone backwards in some ways since the launch of Concorde in 1969, flying passengers between 1974 and 2003 at supersonic speeds of up to 1,334 miles per hour (2,140km/h), at a maximum height of 60,000 feet (18,300m).
Passenger experience will hardly change at all over the next 30 years. Most planes built in the last 40 years have a life expectancy of more than 30 years, or more than 30,000–40,000 flights. So most passengers in 2030 will be flying on planes that were already in use in 2015, maybe designed decades earlier. Jumbo jets were first built in 1969, for example, and some will still be used for long haul in 2025.
Future of cars: cheaper, faster, cleaner, smart
More than 1 billion cars are on the roads today. But we would need to see that rise to 4 billion for the whole world to have the same level of car ownership as America.
Most new car owners will be in emerging markets over the next 50 years. Chinese people are driving 150 million cars, many owned by 40,000 car rental companies. Private car ownership in China jumped from 1% to 19% from 2002 to 2011, with 150 million new cars sold in 2015,
Around half the population in the Philippines and Indonesia do not yet own a car, compared to only 3% in Malaysia, where 53% of households own more than one vehicle. In Thailand and Indonesia 80% of consumers intend to buy a vehicle in the next two years, and in most cases this will be the first car they have ever owned.
We will see significant increases in fuel efficiency, with use of nanotech coatings for all moving parts, and many other advances in engineering, as well as lighter vehicles. These gains will undermine (but not halt) the growth of pure electric vehicles.
Electric cars have taken off more slowly than many manufacturers and governments hoped, held back by expensive batteries. However, battery price per kilowatt hour is set to fall rapidly. New types of battery will be lighter, more efficient, with faster charging and longer life. Some Tesla cars already have a battery life of 400 miles and 600 miles will be quite normal by 2025. Most sales of electric vehicles over the next decade will be smaller models designed for city use, encouraged by tax breaks for owners and subsidies for manufacturers.
City cars will be different
However, traffic jams in many larger cities will be a growing nightmare, especially in emerging nations where car ownership is growing far more rapidly than road construction. Drivers and passengers spend 90 billion hours a year in traffic jams. In some cities, a third of all fuel consumption is used simply in trying to find a parking space.
We will see new patterns of car use. Mobile Apps will make it even easier to hire and drop vehicles for long and short journeys, at very short notice, and easier to hire a car with a driver (despite legal challenges to Taxi Apps like Uber). We will also see more tax breaks, traffic lanes and other incentives to encourage car sharing by commuters as well as more car leasing.
Self-diagnosing and self-repairing cars
It will soon be impossible to buy a car that is not online all the time, or has the potential to be. Laws in the EU, North America and other parts of the world will demand it. For example, all new cars in Europe will very soon be required to send instant breakdown or accident information to the police and rescue services.
Brazil will soon require every new car to have a built-in tracking device to prevent theft. America’s highway agencies are working on proposals to force all new cars to have the ability to network with each other (Vehicle to Vehicle or V2V). Revenues from services, devices and infrastructure for online vehicles could be worth more than $200bn by 2025.
Cars will also self-diagnose problems before they happen, with sensors across every part of the vehicle to monitor tyre pressure, brake pads, piston compression, battery condition, gas emissions, power use. We will see more head-up windscreen displays, with speed and fuel indicators, and a wide range of informatics including navigation and messaging.
Cars will also watch driver behaviour, so that insurers can price each day’s premium on yesterday’s driving patterns for that particular driver. This will help people to drive better and at lower cost, because insurers will reward good behaviour.
Who owns the driver?
Drivers will expect all these new features to be thrown in for the basic price, so manufacturers will be stuck with more costs, without clear benefits.
As in the telco and banking debate, the key issue will be who owns the customer? Indeed, who owns the vehicle? Manufacturers will try to hit back with a one-stop solution. So, for example, they will send details of breakdowns, faults or accidents directly to their own dealers, rather than to local garages.
Car dealers will offer a far wider range of ownership or leasing options, as motorists begin to move away from the traditional ‘buy and keep’ pattern. On the other hand, telco companies, makers of networking devices, producers of driver Apps and V2V services will all build their own clusters of interconnecting technologies. They will try to push back manufacturers into their original roles as makers of ‘mobile travel boxes’ only. Mobile phone companies will also form new partnerships to offer vehicle packages with smart-phones and other technologies.
Semi-automated cars will soon be almost universal
Apple and Google both want to control the car dashboard, and manage networking between cars. The vision is that cars will form their own social networks, constantly exchanging useful information with each other without bothering the driver at all. Live traffic information, common mechanical problems in particular models, best fuel prices, updates to maps. V2V communication will eventually mean the end of traffic lights in some cities, as each vehicle perfectly times its own approach to every junction.
Mercedes-Benz is already selling its Intelligent Drive system, which automatically steers, brakes and accelerates in traffic moving at less than 60km per hour, using ultrasonics and radar. Mobile Apps will soon display or control almost all car functions on some car models, except steering and brakes.
Self-driving cars – with legal issues
Several companies will soon be selling self-driving vehicles, but they will not be widely used on busy public roads outside European cities, America and Asia until at least 2035, because of fears about public safety, and because of regulations. In the meantime, expect rapid growth in use of self-driving farm tractors and industrial vehicles, for example in open-cast mining. But in cities, it will only take a couple of highly publicised deaths of child pedestrians to slow down the introduction of such vehicles for a decade in some places.
More than 1.3 million people die in road traffic accidents each year (more than deaths from malaria or TB) and 50 million more are injured. The big question is this: if a robot kills a pedestrian or an occupant in another vehicle, whose fault is it? Who goes to prison? Is it the vehicle owner? The manufacturer? The software company that controls the robot?
A key argument will be this:
Robot drivers make fewer mistakes, so even if people are killed by robots from time to time, fewer will die than if humans continue to do all the driving.
However, the death rate on roads is 250 times higher in the poorest nations, where the technology will not be working. And very few people get killed on roads in developed nations. One thing is clear: robots will be severely judged.
Homeless cars and car trains
In the world of driverless cars, you will step outside your home to find the car roll up (you have no idea where it parks itself – who cares?). You don’t own it (a really last-century idea), but it feels like yours. You watch a video or take a call, and relax as the car weaves through traffic, safely taking you to work.
A variation will be ‘car trains’ where many cars are driving in a controlled convoy, just a few metres apart, each automatically following the car in front, unless directed to break out by the driver. Many cars already have sensors to maintain distance from the car ahead on motorways, or to park automatically in a tight spot.
So-called flying cars will still be very rare and expensive in 2030, owned only by the super-wealthy, and only permitted outside major cities. Single- or double-seater flying cars have folding wings, which allow them to be driven in a somewhat clumsy fashion on roads. Typical flying speed is 100 miles per hour, a range of 400 miles, and a top road speed of 35 miles an hour.
Space travel and colonies on other planets
Space tourism will grow, with at least three companies carrying up to 1,000 passengers a year into space on short flights by 2035, despite recent setbacks. Watch out for Sierra Nevada Corporation, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences Corp and possibly Virgin Galactic. This will be yet another example of an increasingly bizarre and unequal world, where some people play around in orbit, while 1 billion still lack clean water or enough food.
We will see a new Space Race, dominated by China and Russia, with some American and European action, aiming to send people back to the moon, also to Mars (almost certainly a small group of people on a one-way ticket at first). Expect a small residential unit on the moon by 2040, but with no useful economic purpose. America’s exploration of space will be limited almost entirely to unmanned probes, with almost all additional energies devoted to space-based defence. An important new justification for space budgets will be the claim to be able to deflect or destroy comets that could be on a collision path to earth.
Most spending on space over the next two decades will be on satellites in geostationary or lower orbits, with upgrades to GPS, to allow devices to be located within 10 centimetres. Space will become a potential battle zone, with hundreds of space drones. These will be used to repair, capture, interfere, hack or destroy satellites – and also to destroy drones from other nations.
Most such drones will be owned by America, Russia and China. America has spent $98bn in a decade researching ways to knock out intercontinental ballistic missiles, but with very limited success. This is even more difficult when any satellite could be a drone in disguise, and when any low-orbit drone could contain a nuclear device and a targeting mechanism.
Future of hotels, holidays and medical tourism
The number of people taking more than one annual holiday will more than double over the next 20 years, with soaring numbers enjoying city breaks. It is already the case that around half the UK population takes at least three holidays a year away from home – whether elsewhere in the UK or abroad.
Expect many more culture holidays, exploration holidays, learning holidays, activity holidays. Expect growing popularity of holidays involving risk, excitement and experience, offering extremes of hot and cold, ranging from the United Arab Emirates to Greenland or Iceland, with strong emphasis on eco-aspects or sustainable tourism.
Older travellers look for new experiences
Middle-aged and older travellers will particularly look for experiences they will never forget, pushing their comfort boundaries, to achieve a lifetime ambition. Examples might be deep-sea exploration of wrecks, travelling to the heart of the Antarctic, learning to sail a large yacht, learning to fly a glider, or climbing a high mountain.
Cruise ships will grow in number and size, carrying over 45 million passengers a year by 2025, compared to 22 million today. These ships will be based mainly in the Caribbean and Mediterranean, with some growth in Asia and to exotic locations such as the Antarctic. Many ships are already so large that they have become destinations in their own right, with over 6,000 passengers and 2,500 crew. Larger ships are already restricted in the number of ports that can cope with them, so we will see a boom in cruise docking stations, particularly across the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Asia-Pacific.
The average age of cruise passengers is likely to fall by a further 5 years over the next decade, as more families try out the experience, offset in the following decade by growing numbers of older people in many nations with money to spend. Expect growth in smaller, specialist, themed cruises for older customers who want culture, history and expert learning, or to learn new skills such as painting.
Impact of web on travel agents and airlines
Websites like Airbnb will transform the hotel and hostel industries globally, by creating a vast informal market for people who want to rent out a room or their entire home, matched to others who want a low-cost and more personal alternative to a hotel. This will eat into the growth of budget hotels in popular cities, but they will still expand globally, offering 100% more rooms within a decade.
Traditional travel agents are in free-fall, and will be almost wiped out in many parts of the world by 2030, except for niche specialists. Everything they offer will be available online at the same or lower prices, and they will be unable to make sufficient revenue from commissions.
Many package holiday companies will also face meltdown, driven to the wall by clever travel robots that assemble complex combinations of hotels, flights and car hire at the speed of light, and at unbeatable prices.
However, the best tour companies will do well: offering expert insight into poorly known destinations in exotic places, specialist guides, well-constructed journeys and extraordinary experiences.
Future of education – new ways to learn
School and college is all about preparing a new generation for a global, rapidly changing future, training people to think, giving them a broad understanding of the world, providing useful job skills. In many cases, we will be educating young people for jobs that have yet to be invented, but most education is locked into the past, training people for tasks that no longer exist. It is the same whether the school is private or state funded.
