Urban electric transportation systems: the role of magnetic power transfer

The impending large scale introduction of electric vehicles on the highways provides a unique opportunity not just to eliminate tailpipe emissions, but also to eliminate traffic congestion and to drastically reduce the cost of urban transportation. EVs can be far superior to today´s combustion powered vehicles in convenience and cost per passenger mile when they are components of well-integrated urban transportation systems. Current efforts to make EVs emulate combustion powered vehicles are counterproductive because they encourage the continued proliferation of single occupant automobiles as the basis of ground transportation. Use of single occupant vehicles, however powered, is intolerable because of the limited highway and parking capacity, and the associated energy consumption. One highly effective solution to urban transportation problems is to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads by making commercial service in electric vehicles convenient and inexpensive enough to make it the preferred mode of transportation. The author gives a view of transportation in the year 2000 as it can be, given unimpeded access to the highways and roads by the kind of vigorous entrepreneurs who created the basic transportation technologies a hundred years ago