Where We're Going We Do Need Roads

before that we're based in Atlanta, Georgia. Yes, the A t L. What what. I very much love living in Atlanta. Actually, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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? 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 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

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 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, 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, 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, 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.

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 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.

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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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. 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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. 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 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,

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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. 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

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

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

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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

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 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

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

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 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. 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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

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 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, 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 have suggestions for future episodes of Forward Thinking, maybe there's a topic you want to know more about, send us a message. Our email is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter,

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