PROPOSITION

Although maritime transport is by far the most energy and cost-efficient method of moving freight across the globe, in the present day, nearly half of the cargo arriving and departing the United States travels by air as a result of an unsustainable demand for just-in-time delivery and a model of maritime shipping that has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. Additionally, goods arriving in the United states at ports of entry, as well as goods manufactured domestically, are then moved overwhelmingly across the country overland by trucks, an inefficient and carbon-heavy endeavor. This project looks to the currently burgeoning technology of pneumatic and magnet based high-speed transportation—currently being developed by projects such as the Hyperloop—and suggests that a more immediately useful application for the propulsion technology would be in the rapid movement of cargo: particularly modular shipping containers which would be far better able to withstand the lateral and gravitational forces of acceleration and high speeds than humans, an issue which impedes the technology’s current development and implementation (image 2). The included map (Image 1) imagines a hypothetical continental-scale network of solar powered pneumatic tunnels for a rapid cargo delivery system between major urban centers and seaports, where cargo could be loaded by autonomously operated cranes directly from ship to tunnel and tunnel to ship (Image 3). These loading cranes would be powered by floating arrays of photovoltaic panels, located in adjacent tidal coves which are protected by hybrid-biological breakwaters. Seaports in this new reality would not need the immense acreage of contemporary ones to store and stage containers due to the rapidity and ease of unloading ships and immediately sending goods onward to inland holding and redistribution centers. As a result of such streamlined transportation logistics, most of the newly appropriated coastal lands could be slowly and methodically returned to their native states as tidal estuaries and deciduous continental forests, in effect establishing a regional-scale post-human green-belt for the Atlantic coast. With the land presumably managed by the US Bureau of Land Management and The National Park Service, the costs of systematically decommissioning old industrial and urban infrastructure, and remediating degraded environments could be offset by revenue generated from new recreational uses such as the establishment of new national parks. As such, while the transport tunnels might be constructed at grade or underground in denser urban environments, where they cross over the fragile coastal ecosystems, tunnels would be elevated on seismically braced precast concrete and steel V-shaped pylons to minimize environmental disturbance to the ground, allow for unimpeded animal migration, and make maintenance easy and relatively noninvasive, particularly as sea levels continue to rise. This strategy would not only cut down on time spent loading and unloading ships, but would also reduce the total travel time of trips—and therefore extra energy expenditure—by eliminating the need to navigate inland to urban ports where heavy boat congestion, obstructions, and shallow waters make nautical operations far slower, more complicated, expensive, and ecologically deleterious through the imposition of heavy-handed engineering solutions like channelization and dredging. Instead, ports could be located further out in deeper waters close to the territorial maritime boundary (12 nautical miles out from the current coastline), where shipping lanes for much larger electricpowered cargo ships could be organized and demarcated by allays of deep-sea floating wind turbines (Images 3 and 4). Their positioning along major shipping routes would doubly make their maintenance and upkeep far more efficient. Additionally, wave energy generated by both ocean currents, as well as the turbulence created by constant ship wakes would be recaptured by undersea turbines. Energy harnessed by types of turbines would not only help offset the power produced by the harbor and tunnel photovoltaic arrays, but would also be used to charge the batteries used to power the trans-Atlantic cargo ships (Image 4).