NORTHERN PLANNER

You can’t move for people helping you control time these days. From phones that have the internet to ready drinkable fruit, from TV you can pause to grab and go coffee shops. But no one talks about speed very much.

And no wonder since improvements in that area seem to be long gone – and maybe going in reverse.

If you go back about 200 years, a galloping horse was the limit of how fact a human could travel, but then we had an explosion of speed –  steam trains to motor engines, from jet engines to space craft. But that rate of increase has pretty much stayed static since 1980. And since the end of Concorde means the traveling public cannot go supersonic anymore, you could argue we’ve gone backwards.

Planes these days are about twenty times the velocity of those people first traveled in. At that level we can go further than ever before. But that stopped around 1980. Even the fastest spaceships are only twice as fast as the moon rockets of the 1960’s. It’s taken 40ish to double our very fastest speed, go back 100 years or so and that happened every decade.

But in may ways this may go into reverse.

In the UK at least, most journeys (about 80% I think) are made by car. But you can have all the turbo engines you like, it doesn’t help in a two mile tailback. Most people live in the city now, where traffic lights are set to keep you averaging 15 miles an hour ( incidentally, they are against you since they spend, on average two thirds of their time at red) – they are programmed to slow you down. Car consumption is set to rise further in the UK. Looks like we’ll all be slowing down  a bit.