Beyond speed: a new outlook on mass transport systems in megalopoleis

Abstract

Historically, urban areas expanded proportionally to the maximum speed one could travel within natural travel time budgets. However, driven by the availability of private motorised transport, major urban areas are now expanding so fast that achievable increases in transport speed cannot compensate for the growth in size. More importantly, such issue highlights that these shortcomings are inherent to traditional engineering approaches. Therefore, radical innovation is critical to support the future structures of megalopoleis. We thus propose a new framework for engineering radical change that is based on projection rather than prediction, illustrated by a new concept of operations for metro systems. Our models show that this novel approach can increase door-to-door achievable distances within the natural time budgets by approximately 50% without further increases in maximum line speeds. Expanding the potential applications of this framework, we position this research as a starting point to a new perspective on developing systems to support the complex urban environments of the future.