Water-Transport

However far you travel, your basic needs travel with you. But where do you do “it” when you are in a moving box? In this post, I explore the history and future of toilets in transportation systems.

Climate change is here. It affects transportation systems, sometimes in unexpected ways. In this article, I describe the effects that this year’s drought had on waterways in Germany and world wide.

Standardized containers allows us to transport goods efficiently and in large number across the oceans. What sounds like a modern idea is actually quite old. 2,000 years ago, humans used the same concept for transporting both staple goods and luxuries across the Mediterranean sea and beyond. Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians or Cathargans - many peoples traded goods with each other in the ancient world. One of the most common type of goods were liquids, from wine over olive oil to garum, the popular fish-based condiment of the day. They all needed a way to be stored on a ship. The technology was a kind of bottle made from ceramic, the amphora (plural: amphorae). Also other kinds of food could be stored in the amphorae, like figs or dates from North Africa. ...

Autonomous Drones Perform Inventory in Warehouse A subsidiary of Hyuandai Motors now uses drones to perform inventory in their warehouses. It reduces the time for an inventory by 90% to 30 Minutes. The drones fly autonomously and orient themselves with their cameras - no GPS required. Seems like a perfect way to free humans from boring and repetitive work. Military Transport Drone Carries Freight Almost 1,000km Company MightyFly of California presents an autonomous transport drone. It can fly freight of 220kg for almost 1,000km and take off and land vertically. It is intended for military applications, but can also have civilian use, for instance in disaster relieve. Watch this video to get a first impression. Should this mode of transport prove reliable and efficient, I see the potential to profoundly change freight transport. Imagine a company urgently needs some extra parts from their supplier – they can have them within the hour if they have such a drone. Amazing! Autonomous Submarine for Drug Trafficking When I think of submarines, I think of boats full of soldiers, hunting the enemy or carrying rockets. Transport of people or goods do not come to my mind - even though hypersonic submarines might be used this way in the future. Yet it appears my imagination has not been vivid enough. Submarines, or at least “semisubmersibles”, are alreaddy in active use for freight transport. The use is neither military nor civilian. It is for drug transport. From this article I learned there are actual shipyards in the Columbian jungle. The semisubmersibles carry cocaine and other drugs from Columbia to other countries in America, and now across the globe. Nowadays, these boats can even be unmanned, using Starlink for communication and navigation. Ingenious – and worrying. How can we protect ourselves from such boats, be it for them carrying drugs or even other malign payloads such as explosives? Title Image is a screenshot from the video that MightyFly released on Youtube.

Hydrofoils can reach speeds of up to 100km/h on the water. But they are mainly used in Russia. Why is it that this interesting mode of transportation had its greatest success in the days of the Soviet Union, and what does the future hold for high-speed hydrofoil vessels? Read more in this article.

Nuclear container ships, new maglev plans and parking for SUVs in Paris are the topics of this week’s transportation news roundup.

Drought, drones and maglevs: These are the transportation news stories I found noteworthy in the last two weeks.

Today, submarines are mainly used for military and research purposes. But future developments could make it possible for submarines to travel at many times the speed of sound. Would that make them an attractive mode of transportation for passengers traveling around the world?