Where We're Going We Do Need Roads

Will roads ever change in the future? Learn about self-healing materials, smart highways and whether or not it makes sense to turn roads into a giant solar farm.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says hit the road, Jack.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. How are you

(00:21):
doing today, Jonathan, I'm well, Joe. We should mention that
our co host Lauren is out today. Oh yeah, she
is out, but hopefully she will be back with us
next week. So we've mentioned several times on the show
before that we're based in Atlanta, Georgia. Yes, the A
t L. What what. I very much love living in Atlanta. Actually,

(00:42):
I have a lot of love for the city. But
there is one thing I do not love about this city.
Does it involve putting metal plates onto onto the road
so that when you drive over it it is the
most jarring experience ever. Well, it's the broader concept of
drive in Atlanta, got you? Yeah, that's the road conditions

(01:03):
in Atlanta range from passable to I think mad Max
might have been here. Yeah yeah, yeah, Well I guess
they do that in other cities. I don't know. Yeah,
sometimes like there's been roadwork and yeah, it's like they
don't know. They were like, Oh, there's some huge holes
in the road, We'll just put some tissues over the

(01:23):
top of it. The tissues in the form of like
a giant steel plate bolted down to the road. Yeah,
we've we've had um. There are a few major roads
in Atlanta that get a lot of traffic that have
had this issue. So it got us to thinking, what
if we talked about the future of roads. Is this
what we're destined to be, you know, to to to

(01:43):
live with the rest of our lives. Are we going
to get to a point where we have jet packs
and flying cars but the roads are still covered with
potholes and steel plates? You know? It could be that
that probably depends on the will of our legislators, so
test your local politicians. But anyway, no, I do think
it would be worth talking about roads, which is what

(02:04):
we're gonna do today, because we've talked about the future
of transportation lots of times. We've talked about flying cars,
about electric vehicles, fuel cell vehicles, hybrid vehicles, we've talked
about mass transit. I mean, there's a ton of room
to grow with the future of transportation. But one thing
we haven't really talked about is the transportation infrastructure itself,

(02:24):
the roads and the bridges that get us from place
to place. And you might think, Okay, I mean, how
can roads really changed that? Basically you just need like
a flat surface with some lane markers indicated. There you go,
I mean, what else do you need to change? There's
actually a lot. Yeah, there's there's a lot of the

(02:45):
you know, and there's going to be a kind of
a common theme as we go throughout this podcast, and
the one of the major marks of that common theme
is that any attempt to make big changes to the
road system is going to require an enormous investment of
time and money in resources because it's an established system.

(03:07):
And sure, we spend a lot of money in time
maintaining that system, but the thought of truly upgrading it
is that's a pretty big deal. And that the question
we have to ask ourselves is at what point do
we say, hey, no, this is a it is a
big deal, but it's worth it to go through that process, right,

(03:27):
And I think we should get the big tuna in
the basket out of an expression tuna in the basket.
I should get the big tuna in the basket out
of the basket first, right, And I know you're sitting
there at home thinking solar roadways, solar freaking roadways, as
the video repeatedly announced you did you ever see that video,

(03:50):
the solar freaking roadways video. I don't think so. I
mean I read their their fundraising campaign stuff. So when
there there's a we should, we should say solar roadways
is the name of a proposed system of road redesign
and to to end up instead of using asphalt for roadways,
using solar panels that have been specifically engineered to withstand

(04:12):
the the abuse that a road would encounter on its
day to day life. This blew up on the internet
last year. Yeah, um, it might have even been two
years ago when it first was being mentioned. But at
any rate, you had this couple who had come up
with this this notion, and they had plotted out the
kind of the electronic uh blueprint that would be necessary

(04:36):
to make it work. And we're very optimistic about how
it could be feasible, right, both from a physics standpoint
and an economical standpoint. Although the economic side was largely
obvious skated, I would say the there seemed to be
a belief that the cost of solar panels would drop

(04:58):
dramatically due to an increase in manufacturing, which is generally true,
but you have to get there first, right, it doesn't
magically happen at any rate. The video that went along
with the fundraising campaign had an extremely enthusiastic narrator who
extolled the virtues of solar freaking roadways, and it was

(05:18):
done almost like, uh, like, if you see those all
those commercials for the Monster Truck Rally Sunday Sunday Sunday,
solar freaking roadways, that kind of thing. Um, And if
you think about it, like, if you can make this
system work, there are some legitimate cool things you could

(05:38):
really do with it. One, you could change the road
system from being just this passive network of pathways into
an active electricity generating system. You could power cities with
the roads. Sure well. I mean, if you look out
over a hot highway in the summer, you will notice that, huh,

(05:59):
you know, there's a lot of energy going to waste
when you see the mirage coming up off the road
and the distance that's heat, that's all just entropy, that's
wasted energy. That could that solar energy that's going into
being absorbed by the road and then radiating back outward
as heat could potentially be harnessed. It's it's uh, it's enticing.
It makes you think, oh man, what can we do

(06:21):
with all that energy? Of course, you could say the
same thing about the energy that falls all over the
entire surface of the Earth, over the oceans and the
alerts and yeah, everywhere. I mean, this is the that's
the whole premise of solar energy in the first place,
is to take a surface that is going to be
exposed to solar radiation and cover that surface with solar
cells which are able to absorb solar radiation, and then

(06:44):
convert that into electricity. I mean, that's the whole premise,
and the really the question comes down to does it
make sense in this area? In other words, is the
the expense of purchasing and installing solar panels in that
area going to economically makes sense? Are you going to
receive enough sunlight in that particular area to generate the

(07:07):
electricity you actually require, or is all this effort going
to be for not? Like if I if I cover
an area in solar panels, but that area rarely gets sunlight,
then I haven't done myself any favors. Right, So there
are a lot of these questions, but the the general
thought was, well, the roads cross all over the United States.
That that was the sort of the the area that

(07:29):
the fundraising campaign was focusing on was the United States
of America. So roads go all over the US and
a lot of those roads are receiving tons of sunlight,
even when you factor in the fact that that sometimes
there are cars on the road that blocks sunlight from
happening from hitting the road. But the idea was, oh,
you got this distributed way of generating electricity, a distributed

(07:51):
power generation system, which is incredible. It's it would be
amazing to be able to do this as opposed to
having uh you know, regionalized power generation, right yeah, yeah, sure.
I mean it's easy to get enthusiastic for this idea.
It's like solar roadways applied directly to the roadways, right.
Uh you know, I didn't get that joke for the

(08:12):
longest time until I can't remember what channel finally had
those was it? Is it? Head on? Is that what
it is? I can't apply directly to forehead anyway, um
at any rates. So the idea being that this would
generate electricity. That that would be a huge benefit right
there where you're you're turning something that normally would not
be doing anything other than providing a pathway into power generation.

(08:33):
But also you could have other cool features embedded in it.
Sure well, this would make the roadways inherently electronic, which
would give you the potential to make them not just
passive and static, but to make them active and reactive.
So one of the best features I've actually heard about
the proposition of solar roadways is the idea of dynamic

(08:53):
lane shifting. Right. Yes, so I live off the street
in Atlanta to that has a reversible lane, and this
is the cab avenue. And now you've given my address. No,
no you haven't. You've just given a road I live off.
It's perfectly fine. Road is a long road, Yeah, so

(09:13):
it has. It has in some stretches a center lane. Yes,
that either has an arrow over it or an X.
Full of evil magic. Yeah, it is full of evil magic,
because not everyone knows that a reversible lane. When it's
an X, it means you don't get in that lane.
It means that the traffic that's coming towards you. Oncoming
traffic has that lane and they change it throughout the day.

(09:34):
So in the morning, when there's a lot of traffic
heading into the city, the two lanes that head into
the city or the you know, the middle lane is
the go is now allowing traffic to head towards the city.
And in the afternoon, when a lot of traffic is
moving away, the middle lane allows traffic to move away
from the city. And they they show this with that
X or arrow. The problem is a lot of people

(09:55):
don't know how that works and they or they don't
recognize it, or they think the middle lane is actually
a turning lanes. So with any intersection you might see
someone in the wrong lane of traffic. It's it's as
if they're going the wrong way down a one way street,
you know. To designate this, you're looking at signs hanging
above the road because obviously we can't change the lines
that are painted on the road. They're all series of

(10:16):
of dashed lines. But what if instead of painted lines,
you had embedded L E D s inside these solar
panels and they just took a little bit of electricity
that was being generated by the solar panels and they
projected light so that you would see the division of
the street right there on the street. So, in other words,

(10:39):
you could actually dynamically change those traffic patterns by changing
the lanes as you're driving. It might say, all right,
you need to move over to the right, so you
you move over into the right lane, and then eventually
the lanes change so that the traffic is being directed
in whichever direction it needs to be, and you could
do it as me times throughout the day as was

(11:01):
warranted based upon traffic patterns. You could also set up
warnings for things like, let's say that there has been
an accident. You could actually have warnings displayed on the
street itself to let drivers know about it so that
they can slow down and make sure that they don't
make the situation worse. Um. There were even suggestions that
there could be some sort of pressure sensitivity. I don't

(11:24):
know how you would do this without it the road
constantly going crazy, but that there could be some pressure
sensitivity where if an animal were to start crossing the street,
uh an alert would pop up, or the panels around
where the animals stepping would light up, thus giving drivers
and a visual indication that there is something obstructing the

(11:47):
road and preventing a potential accident. Okay, now, we have
already stated that the cost of installing millions of solar
panels to replace highways could be prohibitive and will get
more into the details in the second But once you're
adding all of this functionality, it sounds like you're increasing
the cost again and again and again. Yeah. Well, and

(12:11):
and that's not the only cost too. I mean there's
another feature that would also add some some cost to this. Yeah, yeah,
so uh there. I don't know, Joe, you and I
we don't deal with us very much. But there's some
places where sometimes water gets cold and then it gets
hard and slippery and turns into this ice stuff, which

(12:32):
we normally find in t A. But it can get
on the ground too, not just in t and that's
when things get tricky. Oh no, this happened in Atlanta.
We'll talk about that situation a little bit later. I
am obviously being facetious. It does happen in Atlanta. We
get ice storms here in the city occasionally. In fact,
we get ice more frequently than we get snow and um.

(12:54):
But the one of the ideas that the solar roadways
people were one of the features they were claiming the
roads would have it. They'd be able to have some
sort of heating element in them, and again you would
dedicate some electricity to the heating element to raise the
temperature of the roads so that ice would not form
on the roads themselves. Uh. Which again that would be
a great feature. Right, So you would have dynamic streets

(13:17):
that could alert you to changing conditions, that could route
traffic in a way to make it as efficient as possible.
That we're generating electricity and we're melting ice. It's pretty amazing. Yeah.
If I could snap my fingers and make that a reality,
I probably would. Yeah, And here's where we start running
into some some problems. So there have been a lot

(13:38):
of folks who have raised some criticism of the solar
roadways plan, uh for for various reasons. Uh. One is
most common criticism I saw was cost. Yeah, that would
be the big one. Uh. Solar panels are not cheap
so um, even if you were to mass manufacture them,
at least in the beginning, they would be pretty expensive
per panel. They're talking about using these hexagonal panels, right,

(14:03):
and you would place them together kind of like a
giant settlers of Catan. Uh. For the entire nation to
drive on. So there's that my street will trade you
sheep for your bricks something along those lines. Yes, and
obviously asphalt is something that can kind of it can
its form, can can curve along with the landscape. So

(14:27):
you know that's another issue is that you've got these
solid panels that don't do that. They don't have flex
to them, so that that causes an issue. So that
means that even if you have the panels, let's say
that you've you've paid for the panels, that's that's awesome,
You've got them, you're ready to put them down. Well,
now you also have to pay for the labor, which
would probably be the it would dwarf the cost of

(14:48):
the solar panels because you have to rip up the
infrastructure you have, the roads you have and install new infrastructure,
which would be the solar panels and the channels necessary
for the cable ing to go along the roads. Because
these panels are are not just magically beaming electricity. They
have to channel you know, they use cables to UH

(15:11):
to run electricity through to the power grid, which also
means you would have to have some sort of power
processings UH system like you know, maybe boxes that would
be along every few hundred feet along the side of
the roads to which the power grid could attach and
the electricity generated by these roads could then flow into
the power grid. Otherwise, where's the where's the electricity going?

(15:32):
I mean, do you just put batteries everywhere? I mean
what it doesn't make sense, right, So then you've got
that expense, they the labor expense. That labor is going
to be additionally more expensive because they're going to have
to start leveling more sections of the road. If you
want these hexagons to line up properly, obviously, you would

(15:54):
not want there to be like sharp peaks from where
to two different panels are meeting over a little you know,
lump in the road or a hill or whatever. So
that's gonna be really expensive. It would take a huge
amount of time too. So it's one thing to repave
a certain stretch of road and you have to route

(16:16):
traffic around it. Anyone who's had to, you know, work
in any kind of of large urban area where there's
roadwork knows how frustrating that can be. Well, imagine if
you're can, you're you are determined to completely replace that
road that the entire highway with solar panels. You you
would have to figure that out. This would take huge
amounts of civil planning to figure out how to route

(16:38):
traffic around an area that is now going to be
off limits while the existing road is dug up and
the new foundation is put down and the new panels
are installed. It's just it's just such a huge undertaking
that it's hard to imagine how you could do it
in a way that would be economically viable. Yeah, when
I encounter this idea, the main question I have is, Okay,

(17:02):
so I understand the proposed benefits of being able to
have like adaptive lane shifting and and and warnings and
messages on the road and stuff like that, but if
you're just talking about generating power, in what way is
solar roadways better than just having a bunch of solar
farms out in the desert. Yeah, that's an excellent question, because,

(17:26):
on top of the expense that we've already covered, solar
panels have a lifetime, right they get gradually they start
to degrade and you need to replace them, So that's
an ongoing expense. It's not just the initial installation. You
would have to continuously spend money to replace solar panels,

(17:46):
and solar panels are not perfectly efficient. They don't capture
all the energy from the sun. They are not able
to convert all of that energy to electricity. The electricity
they do generate is, you know, per solar cell, it
tends to be the the you know, like the Milla
amps level that we're talking tiny amounts of electricity. So yeah, collectively,
you'd be generating a lot, but individually they generate very little.

(18:09):
Oh sure, I mean, I'm not against getting lots of
our energy from solar I think as much as we
could that would be great, But like, why is this
any better than just having a bunch of solar form?
It's not. And that's the problem. Is that because in
order for you to make the let's say that you've
got the best solar cells on the planet, right or
technically orbiting the planet, because those tend to be the

(18:31):
ones that are the highest quality of the ones that
we put into space. Let's say that you get the
highest ones, Well, you're you're going to have to protect
those right from being driven over constantly like some thick
glass that would be supportive of the weight of a truck. Yeah,
so thick tempered glass, which is going to limit the
amount of solar energy that can get to your solar cells.

(18:52):
So you're already taking a hit there. Plus you've got
all these other things to worry about, like dust, dirt, oil, grime,
you know, scratches, all this rubber, all this kind of
stuff that could end up further making the solar cell
less efficient in capturing solar energy, let alone converting it
to electricity. With all that in mind, there are very

(19:15):
few advantages of using this stuff to pave a road
rather than using a giant solar farm where you don't
have those features. Typically don't see giants semitrucks driving over
solar farms. It doesn't happen. But that's exactly what they
do on highways. So a lot of people have said,

(19:36):
why would we ever invest in this? I mean, it's
the features are cool, but they're not cool enough to
justify the expense and the labor necessary to make it happen.
If you, you know, it only makes sense if you've
already exhausted all the other surfaces upon which we could
put solar panels um and we haven't done that. I mean,

(19:59):
we have really put solar panels on that much here
in the United States, you know, comparatively speaking. And if
we had reached that point, then you might say, all right, well,
let's let's turn the roads into into that too, because yeah,
we don't even have solar panels on all our roofs yet,
right put them on the roads exactly. So, I mean

(20:23):
there's also other questions like would these would these roads
remain uh active and and uh and effective for any
length of time. Obviously roads are are subjected to huge
forces repeatedly, and so uh, you know, it may be
that some cells would get knocked out of alignment, which

(20:43):
means they could be disconnected and perhaps no longer generating
electricity or able to display the um the lights. You know,
they might not be communicating anymore effectively, got a dead
pixel in your road? Yeah, And while the design was
was meant to make it easy to replace solar cells,
if that happens frequently, then you've got a huge headache

(21:06):
right as you're constantly having to send cruise out to
either reconnect or replace dead solar cells. Uh. And you
know it's stuff like ice heaving, which is when ice
you know, when when water freezes it expands it's one
of the few things that actually does that. I don't
believe you try it. Here's here's an experiment to try

(21:30):
at home. Fill up a cup of water, uh and
then put it in the freezer, and then observe the
level after it is frozen, and you will see it
is higher than what you've filled it up to. Um
And since ice expands, it can push stuff apart. So
if the water gets in between the solar cells and
then freezes even despite the you know, the heating element,

(21:52):
sometimes the weather can overpower a system like it does
happen if it's if it's intense enough, then you could
up with broken connections that way too. So the ultimately
what it comes down to is all of these problems
are revolving around the expense and the efficiency, neither of

(22:13):
which are at a level that makes a lot of
critics feel comfortable with this approach. Yeah, I think all
these criticisms are valid, though at the same time we
don't want to sound too down on the idea, like
discouraging people from trying. I just think that judging from
the sort of expert criticisms that we've read, it doesn't
seem like this is a very fruitful way to go

(22:35):
forward with with harvesting solar energy for our grid needs. Yeah,
I would. I would look to using more of the
the flat surfaces that are not constantly driven upon as
the potential, uh you know, solar gatherings and places in
a in an urban environment, rather than on the roads themselves.
I think maybe a parking lot. But even then you

(22:59):
have to, like I would experiment with the parking lot first.
I mean, what I would say is why not above
the parking lot instead of on the ground. I mean,
there are already a bunch of parking lots like this
where you have parking spaces lined out, you know, out
in the sun exposed, but above them are sort of
like shades or rooftop type structures that are sort of
leaving the parking lot partially covered. And those have solar

(23:21):
panels on top. Yeah. The and that provides the nice
extra benefit of keeping your car cool in summer so
that you don't have to crank the A C up
to eleven when you get back in the car melt.
The The example I've always seen about using it in
the parking lot was again for those dynamic conditions, which
which is neat you know, it's it is interesting. I
don't know that that's the killer feature that justifies the

(23:46):
incredible expense and the possible ongoing maintenance expense of of
switching to this sort of thing. So I agree. I
think it would make more sense to have a covered
parking area that has solar cell on top of it
to capture solar energy rather than incorporating it into the
parking lot itself, especially considering that if the place is

(24:07):
busy and it's open during the day, then cars are
blocking the sun from reaching the solar cells in the
first place, right, So you know, it would be one
thing if we were all nocturnal, And if we were nocturnal,
then obviously, you know, coding public places with solar cells
would make sense because a lot of people would all
be in bed, right you it would be the ideal

(24:30):
time to have uh to generate electricity. But since we're all,
you know, awake during the day, or most of us,
the vast majority of us, and we're active, then it's
probably not a great idea. So that seems to me
to be a bust as far as the roads of
the future. But there are other things that could be
really important, right sure, Well, you just mentioned a lot

(24:52):
of stuff about the maintenance of roads, and this is
another area where cost is a big factor. So row
and bridge maintenance is serious business, especially here in America.
Roads see a lot of wear and tear. Fixing them
costs society a ton of money, and not fixing them
probably costs even more so. According to aten survey by

(25:17):
Trusted Choice and the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America.
And just to note, this is like an insurance industry survey,
so it's possible the results aren't a hundred percent objective.
That might be some biases, right, but just just as
a starting point for numbers. But between two thousand nine
and fourteen they say that half of all car owners

(25:38):
experienced vehicle damage as a result of potholes. Anyone telling
Ponstantly and Avenue is probably going to say, yes, I
agree with the study. And so just potholes, I mean
they can damage the sidewall, your tire, or even if
they're bad, they can actually damage the wheel itself. Uh.
And according to the same survey quote, poor road conditions

(25:59):
ended up calling the consumers in the insurance industry more
than twenty seven billion dollars during the five year period
of the studies that was two thousand nine. So that's
a lot of money as a result of just damage
caused by problems with the road. Problems that could be fixed.
But there's so much road out there, and you know,

(26:21):
it's just hard to get to these problems, and and
so you let's say that you know, you're a driver
and you have to get from point A to point B,
and between point A point B is a crappy road
with potholes in it, and as a result of having
to take that route, your car gets a bit banged up.
Who ends up paying for that? Oh yeah, well that's
another thing. So either way, this is costing society money.

(26:44):
So they said in this survey of the car owners
who had damage from potholes got a claim filed with
their insurance company. So that means the insurance company is
possibly paying out and it's not like that's just coming
out of their pockets. They're increasing the rates that you
pay to them in order to make up that money.

(27:08):
And then another of the people said that they just
paid out a pocket. Yeah, I mean often makes sense.
If you have minor problems with your car, you don't
want to involve the insurance company and have them punish
you for it. So what a crazy thing insurance is,
right exactly. We could do a whole episode on that later, right,

(27:29):
And then they said this was funny. Three percent said
local authorities paid so essentially the city state and said, ah,
there was a pothole, give me money, right like that.
You know, I literally cannot get to where I need
to go without taking your road. Your road is broken. Therefore,
since you are the entity in charge of your road,
you owe me for that that expense. Hey, if it works,

(27:53):
of course, you know, you could argue that this is
also one of those cases where uh, similar to the
insurance company and maybe the a a political uh entity,
whether it's city or state or whatever, says well, it's true,
we do need to do maintenance on this road. So
in order to do that, let's raise taxcess. Yeah. Well,
in the US government spends a lot of money maintaining

(28:15):
and repairing roads, Like how much is a lot of mine?
A lot? In two thousand and eleven, the US Federal
Highway Administration, they said they committed thirty one point eight
billion dollars to improve US highways and bridges, and of
the thirty one point eight billion, about forty two per
cent or about thirteen point four billion, was quote committed

(28:36):
for improvements designed to maintain or preserve existing roads and bridges,
such as road reconstruction and resurfacing, bridge replacements, and bridge repairs.
So that's just making fixes to existing road surfaces and
bridges to prevent them from causing damage falling apart and
in then that was just the federal Highway Administration. In

(29:01):
two thousand eleven, the same year, the state transportation departments
within the United States spent a total of a hundred
and thirteen billion on highway improvements, including some federal funds,
and of that money, thirty five point five percent, or
about forty point to billion, was Again it was spent
on preservation, construction, roadway resurfacing, bridge repairs, the same kind

(29:25):
of stuff, just fixing the deterioration of road conditions. Oh
and on top of that, the states also spent around
thirty billion on stuff including quote routine maintenance of homes
and bridges. So that was in addition also to highway
safety and law enforcement. Right, so we are talking and
this you know, this is obviously United States, but there

(29:47):
are you know, other countries obviously also have to pay
huge amounts in order to maintain the road systems. So
this is a significant amount of might just to keep
things in drivable condition, right in sometimes in barely drive
a b Yeah, your mileage really may vary. And so

(30:07):
I actually couldn't find any good statistics on this, but
you'd have to assume that poor road conditions like potholes, cracks,
crumbling asphalt, general wear and tear also sometimes contributes to
accidents and collisions. I mean, I couldn't imagine that that
doesn't happen. Yeah, I'm with you. I mean that to
me makes sense. Like clearly, if there is something that

(30:30):
can potentially, you know, damage your vehicle, it could also
potentially lead to an accident. Right, So what if we
could pave our roads with surface materials that don't need
so much maintenance? And what if we could build our
bridges with materials that don't need so many repairs and reconstructions.
So are you talking at Amantium like we just we

(30:53):
just take wolverines claws and turn that into bridges and roads.
Why just as clause, I'm saying you should take wolverine,
liquefy him and then put him under a steam roller.
On the highway. Magneto has tried on multiple occasions, and
that guy has proved to be widely You know, wolverine
applies in multiple ways actually to what I'm about to say,
because adamantium is very strong. But no, that's not what

(31:14):
we should do. Instead, we should take wolverines other special feature,
which is that he is self healing. He has a
healing factor, yeah, mutant healing factor. So we're talking about
materials that, while they're they're not so resilient that they
resist all damage. Rather they are designed to heal damage. Sure,

(31:34):
and scientists and engineers have been working on so called
self healing materials for years. It's actually it's a big
field of materials research these days. It's pretty cool. Yeah,
it's really cool actually us So one example is a
guy named Hank Yonkers of Delft University of Technology in
the Netherlands, and he's been designing a version of self
healing concrete and the way it works is pretty cool.

(31:57):
So distributed throughout the concrete mixture there are tiny capsules
of bacteria and some calcium lactate. And these bacteria like
one kind of be basillous pseudo firm us. Interesting pseudofermus.
Yea fake firm, I don't know, kind of like my mattress.
It's the opposite of true firm. Uh So, Anyway, they

(32:21):
are these little micro organisms that produce biogenic calcite or
or sort of like limestone when they eat calcium lactate
with the stuff that I said was distributed in the concrete.
So when cracks are gaps form in the concrete, the
air and the water get into the concrete and activate
the bacteria, and then the bacteria in turn start munching

(32:45):
on the calcium lactate and they convert it into calcite,
which is the common part of sedimentary rocks like limestone
that can sort of seal back up the crack that
has formed. So so it's almost like imagine that you
have a haulking gun and you have to squirt calk
into something, except this is material that's doing it by
itself because of the bacteria and the and the fuel

(33:07):
the food essentially, yeah, that it consumes to generate this stuff.
That's pretty cool. It's really cool. And they said, you
know that that versions of this could have bacteria that
lie dormant and stay alive for like two hundred years.
So this could have a very good longevity to it. Actually,
and this is talking about concrete mostly in the context
of self healing buildings. The media coverage I've seen of

(33:29):
this has been talking mostly about buildings. But there are
roads that are concrete roads. I mean, we tend to
think of roads as being asphalt paved, but asphalt is
like a you know, it's asphalt concrete, it's like bitumen
enhanced with the attraction enhance er aggregate in there. But yeah,
there are straight up concrete roads. Now, I'm not sure

(33:49):
if this type of self healing concrete would be appropriate
for road surfaces, but the general principle of self healing
material research could be applied to all kinds of road
surfacing materials and the right and this obviously would be
really good for stuff like bridges as well. Certainly. So, uh,
this is a type of self healing material that tends
to be categorized as embedded healing agents. So the embedded

(34:13):
healing agents in this case being the bacteria and the
food that it eats in order to create this this
limestone like material. Um. The there are downsides too embedded
healing agents, the big one being that once it's used up,
you can't. You can't heal it anymore. And typically when
something receives some sort of damage, even after you have

(34:37):
patched it, it's still weaker than what it was before
the damage. So it may be that this kind of
thing will preserve the lifespan or it will elongate the
lifespan of a road, but it would not make it
indefinitely able to heal itself. There are other types of
of research into self healing materials that are are trying

(35:00):
to mimic the way organisms that have a circulatory system
heal and that when I break a bone, which gosh
should happened so frequently. Now, I don't have little capsules
in my bones that are once there's damage to the bones,
they spring into action and stitch it all together. You
have osteoblasts. Yeah, So the way that the healing system

(35:25):
works and organisms that circulatory systems is that essentially your
body sends the stuff that needs to get to a
specific location when it needs to get there. Uh. In
other words, it's it's kind of a response system, like,
you know, let's send the various uh, you know, ingredients
needed to heal this damage right now because damage has happened,

(35:48):
so what if you could design material that does the
same thing, and it's essentially you know, simulating a vascular
system um. In fact, the materials tend to be called
microvascular material els where you build in a delivery system
it's like veins essentially. Yeah, you would have to have
like tiny little tubes that would allow the healing material

(36:11):
to go to the specific location where it needs to
patch whatever the damage is there. There's research into building
materials like this, typically for things again like bridges and buildings,
but also you could potentially do it with roads. The
issue though they're a couple obviously it's a more complex system.
It also is slower than the embedded healing agent system.

(36:35):
I mean, they're the the actual healing agent is located
at the point of damage because the it's distributed throughout
the material, right, Whereas in this case you might have
the healing agent that you have to send to the
location through this circulatory system these series of tubes. Uh yeah,
just like the internet. But it takes time for it

(36:57):
to get there, so it's not something that immediately starts
to heal the damage. And if it whatever it was
that caused the damage is an ongoing issue, it may
be that the damage is getting worse and worse, and
is doing so at a rate faster than what the
system is able to compensate for. So, in other words,
you could send healing stuff through this microvascular system, but

(37:20):
it may not get to where it needs to be
in in amounts large enough for it to reverse or
or or slow that damage to any appreciable amount. So
it has its own drawbacks. In other words, but whatever
method you use, I do think that self healing materials
are going to be a very strong place to look

(37:40):
in the future of roads because of this. This maintenance
cost and the cost of not maintaining roads like it
just benefits society so much to have roads that don't
have maintenance problems, right yeah, I mean if you if
even if you say this material is going to be
much more expensive than your average asphalt is. If you

(38:03):
look at you say, all right, well, what is the
lifespan for this material? How long is it going to
be useful? Uh? Not just in how long will it
be effective with the bacteria living two hundred years for example,
but how long do we estimate it would take before
we have to replace this stuff? If it's long enough,
it may be that economically it balances out because we

(38:25):
already know how much we're spending just on regular roads,
on the damage caused vehicles through road problems, and then
the amount we spend fixing the road. So it may
be that we sit there and say, Okay, this totally
makes sense for us to make this investment because in
the long run, it's going to save us money. Um.
Another interesting thing one of the ones that we wanted

(38:46):
to come back and revisit. You know, we talked about
in the Solar Freaking Roadways about the the anti icing
uh measures, the idea of a heating element that could
keep ice from forming on roads. But that's not the
only anti icing and uh there are places that could
really use it, like our hometown. Sure well, I mean,
what happened in Atlanta was suddenly this city became like

(39:09):
the laughing stock of the entire country because two inches
of snow completely shut down the city. But to be fair,
that snow was icing over. Atlanta is a city with
lots of hills on it. We're not used to these conditions,
and we don't have the equipment necessary to to clear
roads on any kind of you know, reasonable time frame.

(39:33):
So if we lived in a place where we got
snow and ice more frequently. We would have we would
have invested in the infrastructure to salt trucks going by
all the time. And there were also issues of that
that you know, the city was was blamed for not
taking precautionary measures early enough to prevent this from happening.

(39:54):
So one if we could design roads they had precautionary
measures built into them so that it wasn't an issue
of oh, we didn't send the salt trucks out on time. Right. Well,
there are such things as anti icing technologies and they
actually already exist today. There there are technologies that you
can apply to the road surfaces in your area that

(40:17):
will respond to freezing conditions so that you don't have
to go out and apply the de icing agent. It's
already built into the road. But they're not awesome today
and that that's one area that I think we could
see expansion in the future, is anti icing technologies getting
better than they are. So what are the technologies today, Well,

(40:39):
essentially we're talking about chemicals that it's a combination. It's
chemicals and aggregate. So the aggregate is meant to be
like this rough surface to get good traction to provide
better traction exactly, and then the chemicals are meant to
decrease the freezing temperature of water, which is actually what
salt does. Yeah, it's exact. Actually what salt does. I mean,

(41:00):
it's it's what pretty any anti icing chemical, that's really
what ultimately is going on. It's it's it's making the
freezing temperature of water go lower and lower, so that
the temperature itself has to be colder than freezing for
the water to turn into ice. So you know, typically
water turns a dice at zero degrees celsius. But if
you're able to lower that, then you can help prevent

(41:22):
ice from forming on roads in all but the most
extreme conditions. If if we do get to a point
where the temperature is significantly low, and we saw that
happen in twenty fourteen, there were some cities that reached
incredibly low temperatures in uh, then it might not matter.
Right in those cases, it may be that it's so
cold that even with the chemicals in place, you cannot

(41:45):
prevent the ice from forming. But under typical conditions like
the kind that hit Atlanta in you might be able
to prevent that ice from forming and it's it's like
you've salted the roads. Now, imbuing your your road system
with these chemicals, you know, building that into the asphalt
itself is a great way of having a preventive uh

(42:10):
anti icing you know strategy. However, like the self healing
embedded agents, it's one of those that could potentially be
depleted over time, So then you might be able to
have your your road be ice free for a few seasons,
but it may be something that you have to look into,
like how can we you know, refresh this system so

(42:31):
that it still does it the next year. Another thing
that I think is going to be really important is
looking at the environmental impact anti icing road surfaces, because
I'm sure there are ways of doing it that are
less environmentally detrimental than others. I mean, if you have
you don't want a road that just sort of exudes
free on. Yeah, you don't want anti freeze just bleeding

(42:53):
out of your streets and then running off into the
forests on either side of the road. So what you're
working on is trying to design anti icing agents that
aren't going to harm wildlife and uh and and cause
toxic conditions, right, yeah, it is. It is one of
those things that's delicate balance, right, So uh, making sure

(43:14):
that you have that that right balance, that the chemical
is going to be effective but not harmful, Also that
the aggregate itself, Like you know, creating that traction is great,
but as traffic continues to go across this road is
going to wear that down. I mean, that's just going
to happen from the countless cars that are going to

(43:35):
cross over it, which means it's going to be less
and less effective each year. So that's also something that
eventually you will have to replace. So these these solutions
we're looking at aren't like a permanent fix, you know,
they're they're largely things that will extend the lifetime or
will extend the utility of a road, particularly in what

(43:56):
would otherwise be hazardous conditions. But they aren't you know.
It's not you do it once and you're done. It's
this is stuff that would have to be reapplied or maintained,
just as our road systems are now, but maybe not
as frequently as they are now. That would be great. Yeah,
And then there is one other big technology that I

(44:17):
think actually could be one of the most interesting of
all the ones we've talked about. Yeah, so we know
the benefits of electric vehicles obviously, I mean, gas cars
put out a lot of carbon emissions. They consume gasoline, uh,
you know, which is in fact a limited resource. And
there are obvious advantages to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

(44:42):
But it's just not taken off like we hoped it would.
I mean it might sometime in the near future. Um,
but the the widespread adoption of electric vehicles has been slow.
There's a and there are a few factors, right, is
that they tend to be more expensive, of course, so

(45:03):
that's that's one barrier to entry. We hope the costs
will come down over time more people buy them. They
have been coming down. It's just you know, it's again
we're very early on in the new electric vehicle adoption phase.
Keeping in mind electric vehicles actually pre date the internal
combustion engine style. But at any rate, so the cost

(45:24):
is one barrier. Another one is that, uh, the charging
infrastructure is still being built out right, So if you
if you want to charge your vehicle, there are more
places to do that than there used to be. But
still it's not like there's a gas there's not like
a charging station in every corner, like there's a gas
station everywhere, right, and so you have this fear. It's

(45:45):
sort of tied to range anxiety, but it's different. It's
the sphere of, well, what if I'm driving around all
day and I can't find a place to plug in
my electric vehicle to recharge it. Well, I mean, we
live in a world now where are used to the
feeling of looking at your phone and seeing that under
ten percent battery power light come on, and feel that

(46:08):
fear of I'm not going to be able to use
this in a very short while. I mean that that's
for some of us, depending on how old our phone
is and what brand it is, that might happen every day.
And then you think, well, what do you extend that?
What did this happen to me in my car? What
if my car was telling me, hey, buddy, you need
to find a charging station because if you don't find
one in the next fifteen minutes, you're not going anywhere.

(46:30):
That's the fear, right, And whether it's realistic or not
doesn't matter so much as if the fear is there,
that's a barrier. Yeah, but what if you didn't have
to find a place to plug your car in in
order to recharge it. So you're looking at a future
of incredibly long extension cords. That is exactly what I'm

(46:52):
talking about. No, I'm talking about wireless charging for electric
vehicle inductive coupling. Oh yes, so we've talked about inductive
coupling on the show before. We should do a real
brief refresher on how it works. What's the concept here?
All right? So the easiest way of looking at is
think about one of those electric toothbrushes that has a
little charging station and you put the you know, the

(47:15):
toothbrush stands on top of it like it's a little
just a little base, and then it charges that way.
Doesn't plug into anything, there's no contacts or anything. You
just have to have the one device on top of
the other one and it charges. Here's what's going on.
We've talked about electro magnetism a lot, this relationship between
electricity and magnetism. If you run an electric current through

(47:36):
a coil of wire, you generate a magnetic field, and
the more coils you have, the bigger the magnetic field is.
The more you amplify that magnetic field, you put a
second coil of wire within that first magnetic coil wires
magnetic field. The magnetic field will induce electricity to flow
through that second coil of wire. So you've got the

(47:56):
coil wire one, you run electricity through it generates a
magnetic field. Coil wire two comes into into Within that
magnetic field, electricity is induced to flow through the second
coil of wire. Um if you were to do this
with enough power, you could generate quite a bit of
electricity running through that second coil. And if you connected

(48:17):
that second coil to something useful like either an electric
motor or preferably to a battery, you could have electricity
power that or charge it in the case of the battery.
So if you had a vehicle that had this inductive
coupling kind of system in it, essentially it has a
big coil running through it that then leads to the

(48:38):
vehicle's battery. And then you had, you know, an infrastructure
that had similar coils that have power running through it,
generating this magnetic field. You could keep a charge running
through your car's coil, thus continuously charging your battery. Pretty amazing,
and this is something that actual research as are working on,

(49:00):
like the idea of how you can design cars that
can receive a charge, and design charging stations underneath roads
that can charge cars without the car having to sit
there right on top of the thing. Yeah. Now we've
seen some where they have been designed where a vehicle
just sits on top of it. Sure. One example would
be like an electric bus, and when the bus pulls

(49:23):
up to a bus stop where they know it's going
to be stationary for some amount of time, pretty frequently
underneath the road in the bus stop, there's a charging
station and it it induces this current, uh, creates the
magnetic field and recharges the bus's battery a little bit,
right and uh, and so the bus doesn't have to,
you know, come go offline throughout the day and have

(49:45):
another bus come on while it charges. It's constantly charging,
so it can last as long as it needs to. Sure,
but ideally what you would be able to do is
have roads that charge you whether you're moving or standing still,
no matter where you are right, which means that you
would have to have a series of these uh inductive
coupling coils underneath the road. You couldn't just have it

(50:07):
in one spot, because as soon as you moved down
the magnetic field, you're no longer getting that electricity induced
to flow through the coil of your vehicle. So you
would have to have these lining the roads essentially, either
underneath or you could do it on the side. It
doesn't have to be directly under it. You just have
to be within range of wherever the magnetic field is.
And of course the more power you are, the more

(50:28):
coils you have, really the bigger the magnetic field. So
if you do a lot of coils, you could have
a pretty big magnetic field. We don't really know what
that might do to everything else. Oh yeah, if you
have a pacemaker you know, I don't know, you know,
or or it may it may interfere with electronic devices
in the vehicle itself. In fact, there's a lot of
study that's going into you know, would inductive coupling interfere
with other systems on the car, because obviously you don't

(50:49):
want that to happen either. But there have been there's
been research at Stanford, for example, about how how many
would it take and how could a car continue to
charge its battery even if it's moving at highways highway speeds.
How much charge did they get on that experiment. Tim
killer Watts is the amount of electricity they were able

(51:10):
to to transfer over with percent efficiency. Yeah, of the
electricity they were trying to transmit was actually working. So
uh this was by the way, all done in computer simulation.
Not practical. This was computer simulation. But they said, even
moving at highway speed, that's not just like somebody dreamed it.

(51:30):
I mean, they are scientists, they know what they're Yeah,
they're actually you know, the numbers are adding up, is
what we're saying. But you know, it could be that
there's something that would interfere with that in a real
world setting. Obviously you have to you know, you can't
just rely that a simulation is a perfect, you know,
a perfect representation of reality. But but it's promising because
it could mean that if you had a highway that

(51:53):
had these uh these devices in them are this essentially
this series of of coils of wire underneath it, and
you were driving electric vehicle, your vehicle would consistently being
would consistently be charged as you drove into fact, there
were people at the Stanford say you said, you could
in theory take your car out of your garage at
a low charge and when you come back home because

(52:15):
of the roads being this way, it would actually be
charged higher than when you left the house. That's amazing.
And there are a few things I want to say
about this. One of them is that obviously this, like
the solar roadways thing, would have to be a huge
infrastructure investment. But somehow actually this strikes me as perhaps
more worthwhile as a huge infrastructure investment than trying to

(52:39):
turn our roads into solar grids. Well, for one thing
you're talking about not you know, we don't know how
much electricity such a system would generate with solar panels,
right we we suspect it's less than what we're being
told under the solar freaking roadways thing. Um, it's probably
you know, because because of the multiple s as we

(53:00):
brought up, So we don't know from an energy and
economics perspective if it makes sense. However, getting cars off
of gasoline would be huge, Right, So that's enormous. Already,
being able to keep them charged and you know, indefinitely
as long as they're on the road is huge because
there's no need to um, but you don't have that

(53:20):
fear anymore that you're not going to be able to
get to where you need to go. Yeah, there's actually
Another thing that I think is sort of like a
virtuous piece of feedback from this, which is that if
you could have cars continuously charged as they move along
the road, you could probably reduce the size of electric
vehicle batteries, which is one of the biggest problems with
electric vehicles as they are. I mean, what percent of

(53:43):
the weight of an electric car right now is just
its battery? And it's pretty big, right, and things are massive,
And by reducing the weight, you don't need as strong
of a of an electric motor to propel that vehicle.
I mean, and actually there's a lot of trickle down
stuff here that would be of huge benefit. So factoring
all that, and I agree, I think that this would

(54:04):
be a more uh. I think this would pay off
more than the solar roadways approach. I also think it
would still be such an enormous undertaking that it's hard
for me to imagine it happening. Unless we got to
a point where, like it was, we were in a
really bad situation then that we had to make this

(54:24):
kind of decision. I wish that that weren't the case.
I wish we would just say, oh, well, this is
worth doing, let's do it now. And that will save
us a lot of heartache in the future. Keeping in
mind obviously that however you generate your electricity may still
be contributing to other issues, right like if it's all
coming from coal firing plants. We've said this all the time,
you have to look at the big picture. Well, but
I mean, I think even coal is going to be

(54:46):
better than just burning gasoline. But well, yeah, I mean
you would be you know, right now we're burning coal
and gasoline, whereas if we'd moved to just burning coal,
that might be slightly better. Um yeah, So I ideally
what we would just do is all work on bicycles
all day long, like that episode of Black Mirror, and
get our power that way, right, all right, And that's

(55:08):
all we do like that, That is our job, is
just riding a bicycle all day long and buying stuff. Uh. Well,
one other thing we can talk about besides the possibility
of creating these you know, these wireless powered or wireless
powering roads where they're powering the actual vehicles were driving,
is the idea of the smart road. So you remember,

(55:30):
like we've you've seen the old videos from like the
World's Fair from you know, a century ago, where the
the idea would be that we would have these intelligent
roadways that would take over for us. Like for those
who haven't seen them. One of the first UH concepts
of the the autonomous card computers three tall right, One

(55:55):
of the one of the early concepts didn't have autonomous
cars being autonomous. It was the roads that were autonomous.
The cars were kind of passive. They would just get
onto the road and the road would take you to
where you needed to go. Now, I know some people
still think of it that way, but I I tend
to have been swayed away from the idea that the
road itself or the infrastructure should be controlling the flow

(56:17):
of traffic. Right. I think I've been persuaded that it's
better to go at a car by car traffic decision
making system. Well, especially if you talk about you know,
a failure, a failure within one vehicle, If all the
other vehicles are still you know, their own sovereign systems,
they can compensate, they can get around the vehicle that's failed.

(56:37):
Whereas if as a road system that fails, no one's
going anywhere, right, So it's it's the difference between a
you know, having your own battery power on your computer
or having having to plug into a a building and
if the building's power goes out and your your computer
doesn't have a battery, then you're out too. But if
you have a battery, you can keep going. Same sort

(56:59):
of thing. Um and I I agree. I think that
it is much better to look at making the car
as smart as possible. But now we're starting to see
some people kind of re explore the possibility of having
smart roads where we have the Internet of things kick in,
where it's maybe not built into the actual road itself,

(57:21):
but it's all part of that road infrastructure. Well, yeah,
I can definitely see a sort of synergistic relationship between
smart cars that are pretty smart on their own talking
to an infrastructure. Mainly, what I would see the role
of the infrastructure to be would be providing data, So
the car would be making the decisions, but the road
and traffic infrastructure might be feeding it information about what

(57:44):
routes are currently clogged, um about you know, live updates
on the timing for the stoplights coming up, stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah,
everything from uh you know, dynamic traffic management to uh
proces ably providing important information to emergency responders, or even
to the vehicle so that the vehicles move out the

(58:06):
way of the emergency responders. That kind of stuff makes
perfect sense, and you could you could achieve a lot
of that with vehicle to vehicle communications, and there's a
lot of study in that as well. It gets a
little complicated seeing as how we have all these different
companies trying to develop autonomous vehicles, so making sure that
they can communicate with a common language is important. But

(58:26):
having the infrastructure be part of that would just increase
that versatility. Though then again, uh, not to poke too
many holes in this, but uh, I think also you
could just think about the internet as being the thing
that provides the traffic data, like it wouldn't necessarily have
to be physical infrastructure in place around the area. I mean,

(58:48):
traffic could upload data about the environment to the cloud,
and then your car downloads from the cloud what the
other cars have told. Is sure, but if you're what
we're worrying about, like maybe the traffic system channeling traffic
more efficiently, then you probably want to have some smart
infrastructure there too. So so for highways, it's one thing.

(59:08):
For surface streets where you want to get through a city,
like let's you know, imagine again using the reversible lanes approach. Um.
You know, we talked about how it's it's a dumb system.
Dumb meaning that it's not dynamic or smart. It it's
working on a timer. It's essentially, from this hour to
that hour, allow two lanes of traffic to move in

(59:30):
this direction, and from that hour to this hour, reverse
that middle lane so that two lanes are are traveling
in the opposite direction. That's it. It can't dynamically switch
from one to the other even if conditions change. But
a smart system, one that's working with the Internet of Things,
would be able to do that. So that's kind of

(59:50):
the idea is that I think the these smart roads
of the future will largely the roads themselves will still
be asphalt, maybe with some of these other things that
we've taught to about self healing materials or the the
anti icing materials, but otherwise they'll just be what it's
always been. But the the stuff around it, the censors
and things that will be embedded into other parts of

(01:00:12):
the road infrastructure, will make it a smart road. It
just won't be a smart road, you know, it won't
be like you dig up part of the road and
you're like, oh, here's where the brain was at least
I hope not so the master control program exactly. Yeah,
so this was kind of this was a fun one. All.
We've got a video episode coming up before too long

(01:00:34):
that also explores this, uh, this concept, so make sure
you check that out as well. And Joe, you wrote
that one, didn't you. Yes, I actually have not finished
writing it yet. I have finished, I haven't submitted my
final draft, right, so it's it's it's in process, but
it'll be uh, you know, Joe writes several of the
episodes of Forward Thinking. I write some of them in Lauren, right,

(01:00:55):
some of them, so it's, uh, this will be a
Joe episode, So you'll have to check that out and
see the amazing visual effects our team adds to this,
because they're always they're always, they're always phenomenal. I always
I love watching when our team comes up with with
the animations and effects and stuff. But we'll definitely talk
more about that in that episode. And if you guys

(01:01:16):
have suggestions for future episodes of Forward Thinking, maybe there's
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forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear from us
again really soon. We're more on this topic in the
future of technology. I'll visit Forward thinking dot com. Brought

(01:01:58):
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,