Slow Battery Powered High Speed Train for New Developments Between Canberra, Woolongong, Sydney, and Newcastle

Battery Powered Inter-city Train
Under Development, Railway Gazette,
5 June 2023

This is to suggest 200 kph battery powered high speed trains be run between Canberra, Sydney, and Newcastle. The trains would run at the lowest speed considered "high", and be modified diesel-electric units, to reduce cost. The batteries would be recharged from overhead catenary wires, extending ten kilometers each side of the stations. The catenary would provide ten minutes charging, while the train slows, stops, then accelerates. This would reduce the size of batteries needed, as the train would be at full speed before it switched to battery power. New settlements would be built, so that stations are no more than 100 km apart, thus limiting the battery capacity needed. The increase in land value from new homes would provide billions of dollars to offset the cost of the rail line. The overhead wires would be powered from the grid at the settlements, with rest of the track would be un-powered, to reduce cost. 

Autonomous Kei Car Highway

Nissan Dayz kei car

On Friday I attended the Spatial Futures Forum  on Intelligent Cities and Transport hosted by University of Sydney. One topic was autonomous vehicles. It was pointed out that these would not help those who do not own a car, and are outside the cities which have autonomous public transport. However, it it occurred to me that a form of miniature autonomous public/private transport system could be built for the zone just outside cities.

Nissan has announced its Dayz Wider Kei car will be equipped with semi-autonomous assistance with acceleration, steering and braking on the highway.

If such Kei Cars are used, then the width of a standard Australian traffic lane (3.5 m) could carry two lanes of oncoming traffic. Conventional vehicles, such as fire appliances, could use this road, with the oncoming traffic diverted to a passing loop (as is done with railways).

This would greatly reduce the cost of building a highway, as it would only need to be 3.5 m wide for most of its length. Where cost and space are at a premium, and conventional vehicle access is not needed, an even narrower single lane roadway could be used. This would allow bridges and elevated roadways to be quickly built from shipping container sized modules. Tunnels would only need to be about 3 m in diameter.

Data Driving the Smart City in Canberra

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Future of the Web: Data drives the Smart City, just started. This is in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This will be repeated Thursday 10 May in Sydney. I consider the "Smart City" to be like the smart home: mostly marketing hype. It will be interesting to see if today's speakers can change my view.

The first speaker was Dr Ole Nielsen, Deputy Chief Digital Officer and Director of Digital Transformation, ACT Government. I asked Dr Nielsen if the ACT Government was securing system sufficiently against cyber attack. He replied that data should not be stored on drives connected to people's email and data stored in the basement of offices is no more secure than on Amazon Web Services.
 

9.35am	Industry Keynote	Dr Mukesh Mohania (IBM Distinguished Engineer in IBM Research)
10.05am	Ubiquitous sensing, located	Dr Kerry Taylor (Chair, W3C Spatial Data on the Web)
10.35am	Break
10.50am	Smart Grid	Dr Lachlan Blackhall (Head of the Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program, ANU) Dr Armin Haller (W3C Office Manager, ANU)
11.30am	Power to the People: Privacy in the smart city	(in Melbourne) Dr David Hyland-Wood (Blockchain Protocol Architect, Consensys) (in Canberra) Dr Peter Christen (Professor, Data Mining and Matching, ANU) (in Sydney) Christine Cowper (Principal Consultant, Information Integrity Solutions)
12.00pm	Panel: “How do we best enable smart cities?” round-up of W3C activities and value proposition capacity building – what skills do we need? what issues should we consider? How do we solve them? Discussion with all earlier speakers	chaired by  J. Alan Bird (W3C Global Business Development Lead) All above speakers as participants Interactive audience

High Speed Rail Needs High Speed Data

Consolidated Land and Rail Australia Pty Ltd (CLARA) have proposed building "new regional, compact, sustainable, smart-cities" on a new very high speed rail line from Sydney to Melbourne. The increase in value of the land, would be used to pay for the rail line. Previously I suggested looking at the use of high speed broadband data in reducing the cost and speeding the development of such a project:

Home owners will be reluctant to move to a new city, until it has a hospital, university, business center, entertainment, shops and transport system. Investors and government will be reluctant to provide these services until there is a population to use them. One way around this impasse is to use broadband to provide services quickly at low cost.

High quality, high speed broadband can be used to link the local facilities. The local doctor can consult capital city specialists, students can attend virtual classes and employees work in shared offices. All these services can be provided when the city is established, instead of having to wait years, or decades.

Australian Government Smart Cities Plan

The Australian Government released a "Smart Cities Plan" (29 April 2016). This has three components: Smart Investment, Smart Policy and Smart Technology. There is only $50 million in expenditure proposed, for Infrastructure Planning. However, this could have a major influence on Australian investment in cities, as local and state governments would be able to obtain an Australian government guarantee for borrowing if they obtain federal approval for projects.

The Smart Cities Plan also mentions use of smart technology and Regional cities. An example mentioned are high speed rail through "innovative funding and financing" (that is by capturing the increase in land value along the route).

One way I suggest technology could be used is to accelerate the development of new cities on new high speed rail routes and reduce the cost. People will be reluctant to move to a new city until it has a hospital, university, business center, entertainment, shops and transport system. These could all be provided cheaper and more quickly by using new technology. That will enable the sale of residential and business land more quickly in the new city, thus reducing the cost of finance.

However, there is a risk that the new "Infrastructure Financing Unit" (IFU) will become a real world version of the fictional "Nation Building Authority" (NBA) in the TV comedy "Utopia". The NBA is constantly frustrated in its plans for long term development, by the short term political aims of the elected politicians.

Broadband for Smart Cities

The book "Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013) by Anthony M. Townsend, looks at how cities can use information and communications technology. Townsend covers a lot of territory, looking at cities not only in the USA but in developing nations and issues from security, to the environment. Unfortunately the narrative is a little hard to follow and for the first hundred pages I wondered what the book was about. It was only when Townsend started relating his own experience of building community non-profit WiFi services in New York that the book started to make sense. The heavy emphasis on US developments of technology is also a little distracting. There is barely any acknowledgement that many ICT developments came from elsewhere (for example, the World Wide Web from Europe, the ARM chip from the UK and WiFi from Australia). Townsend raises many issues but then seems to move on to another. This is a useful book to dip into, but frustrating to read from start to finish.

The attempts Townsend relates of communities to provide ubiquitous broadband are very relevant to current Australian discussions of the National Broadband Network (NBN). He relates lobbying of government by telecommunications companies interested in not having a public sector rival. Townsend is suspicious of private company involvement in community networking. He portrays non-profit community providers of broadband in USA as heroes and credits mobile data networks in developing nations with being important in economic development, However, Townsend seems reluctant to acknowledge the role of telecommunications companies in providing wireless broadband in developed nations. There has been a problem that the telcos have charged prices for mobile broadband. For Australia I have suggested that mobile broadband could complement cabled services, with some govenrment intervention.

Australian Transport Future at AusRAIL 2012 in Canberra

Greetings from the National Convention Centre in Canberra where the Australian Railway conference "AusRAIL 2012" is on today. The conference exhibition has spilled out of the exhibition hall into the foyer and upper levels. Heavy engineering companies from around the world are alongside Australian logistics and ICT. The exhibition is free and open to industry, academia and government until 3pm today. The next conference is November 2013 in Sydney.

One exhibit which sparked my interest were IBM, with Doug Stapleton showing their "IBM Intelligent Operations Centre for Smarter Cities". IBM are partnering with management technology company SMS. Greg Halliday from SMS was showing various Sydney transport monitoring applications brought together on one screen for better co-ordination. I asked if they had a video to show to my ICT Sustainability students.

Dion Castle from PivoTel was showing  pocket size satellite terminals. The inReach is a 2 way satellite communicator is a solid looking almost cubic device which can be worn on a belt. It has no display and just a few buttons. On its own it can be used to send out a regular message to allow the wearer to be tracks and has an SOS button. But the device also has a Bluetooth interface allowing text messages to be received and sent from a smart phone.

At a time when the emphasis is on higher and higher speed broadband communications, it is important to keep in mind that much can be done with very low bandwidth high latency communications. This is important when you are outside the coverage of urban communications networks, or when those networks fail, especially in an emergency.

IBM Smarter Cities Not Smart Idea

IBM is offering a cloud based Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities. This is suggested as a way to centralize city operations and deal with a crisis. However, this is the same flawed approach as Microsoft's house of future. These visions assume centralized control is required, which makes the systems very fragile. We need resilient systems, with distributed local intelligence which will continue to operate when communications links are lost and retention of reliable mechanical systems for when the automation fails.

Similarly, you would be nuts to build a city which relied on a cloud based operations center. If the operations center was disabled, due to accident or attack, or the links to the cloud facilities were lost, the city would cease to function. The result would be a disaster, as you would not even be able to warn the citizens or organize an evacuation, as the communications to do so would also be down.

Apart from accident, deliberate attack needs to be considered. The Stuxnet computer worm is rumored to have damaged nuclear processing facilities in Iran. An attack on the centralized operations center and computer controlled equipment of a city could paralyze the provision of services and result in the deaths of thousands of citizens, directly and indirectly.

We need to build our city systems the way the army trains its troops: they are not trained to be mindless automatons following orders. In battle communications are often poor and those at the top have little idea as to what is happening on the battlefield. They rely on the judgment of those on the front line. Similarly the city needs its automated systems and its staff to know what to do in a crisis, without detailed orders from a center which may not be contactable, be there, or be giving sensible advice.