What is transportation?
----The process of carrying something or somebody from one place to another place, horses, bicycles, car, trains, boats, planes and even rockets are different sorts of transportation tools.
Ages ago, human beings used their feet as main transportation tools. Many years later, when they managed to learn how to tame animals, horses were caught and ridden in order to save their energy and time. However, horses are lives, they will get tired as human beings, therefore people tried to invent something that can be ridden mechanically to save natural resources, bicycle was invented. Bicycles could be ridden on land only, how about in the see? Some clever fellas squeezed their brains and discovered that wood could float on the water, hence something called boat came out to say hi to the world. Lazy as human beings, they wanted to save their own energy to rest their asses, instead of riding and boating, they magically copied the Steam Revolution and produced motors, shamefully they never ever mentioned to pay for the copy right. With motors, motorbikes and engine boats were able to show off their advance to the crowd. Well, one day they realised that motorbikes and engine boats were not safe enough, it would be great if they could be covered by hard skin. Where there is a will, there is a way! Cars and ships were brought to motivate people to win dangerous driving awards with higher safety indices. Accidents and conflicts occurred when cars, motorbikes and bicycles were sharing the same roads, causing serious problems all the time. As a result of human being’s selfness, trains were developed with its own rail tracks. And tubes were developed to run underground. Due to geographical constrains, cars, trains and ships were not fast enough, and people wanted to experience flying in the sky, they stole birds’ patent and invented planes to carry people above the ground and take them to wherever they want, even to the “hell” when the God punished people for skipping patent payment to birds.
Those above are what we have nowadays, what will be the next generation of transportation tools?
Japan is currently using magnetic levitation to avoid physical contacts between tracks and the trains, so that the trains are literally running on air and that can reach a maximum speed of 500 km per hour. This is one example to illustrate the new generation of transportation tools.
When I went for the meeting in Derby, after we discussed about the performance of the world’s rail industry and how to improve the capacity of the rail network, people contributed some extreme ridiculous ideas on new vehicles. Some of them suggested building double-decked trains to seat more passengers in the trains; some of them suggested building national underground network etc.
I am thinking following the way that the developments so far, there might be something called Airbus in the future, of course with essential lifts to carry people to reach the airbuses, and they will go and stop at people’s individual destinations. Some of them can fly at lower level on certain lines, and some can be higher on others to avoid crashes. Or if there is space, we can build up tunnels across the whole country and design special cars to reach higher maximum speeds, so that if people want to go to Edinburgh from London, it will take them less than two hours by cars, although it might seem to be a bit extreme and impossible, but we never know what will happen in the future.
Yesterday is a history with the development of all sorts of things
Today is a gift to us as we have all of them ready to use
Tomorrow is a mystery, we will see what happens |
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