An efficient economic model that would support a quality of life, for all earth's people, better than that of a well to do retired person today, with a clean environment, and possible by 2030. The Basis for Change, or BFC economy, is built upon the efficiencies provided by our NETS transportation system.

BFC is based on optimizing a household's and an individual’s needs for tasks rather than owning capital goods.

Do you want to own a clothes washer and dryer, or do you want clean clothes to wear every day? Do you want to have closets and drawers full of clothes you seldom wear, or be able to choose what to wear every morning from the entire stock of clothing that fits and suits you, and is available somewhere in your city? What if the cost to wear the garment for the day would be close to the purchase cost of the garment divided by the number of times it gets worn, by anyone, in its lifetime.

BFC replaces most corporations with household owner operated services requiring far fewer than 10% of the man-hours of labour our economy uses today. That is why anyone who desires it could be "retired" from birth, while still having a high quality of life.

NETS is our name for a New Transportation System. Relative to our current transportation system we call CUTS, NETS is far safer, with shorter passenger trip times, about a 100 to 1 reduction in costs per vehicle-km with potentially no fees for passenger trips within a landmass, and environmentally friendly. Each topic is covered in one or more videos in this playlist.

While NETS is better, to far better, in all these areas than CUTS, it would also virtually eliminate the transportation system demand for jobs, and opportunities for profits. Similar job reductions will occur in many other areas based on the NETS cost and performance characteristics. Profit opportunities in those areas would be significantly transformed based on newly available opportunities for fine-grained services, including per use rentals, and their interactions with ownership. These are enabled by the ability of NETS to provide automated deliveries and pickups of any available object, inside a NETS box, within a minute, and for less than 1/10th of a cent, within settlements.

NETS could be fully deployed globally before 2030. But this will require a large grass roots effort.

On the technical side it will require work on the final design details. We envision something like the free software and maker communities. Where physical prototypes are required, or things like wind tunnel tests, crowd funding would be exploited.

NETS would require wide spread buy-in to be deployed in any region. Although we use the US and Canada as examples throughout our presentation we believe initial NETS deployments would be in poorer areas of the world where they will simply skip the CUTS stage, as they are doing with information communications.

The political effort for all areas of educating the public about the possibilities of NETS, and the overall BasisForChange it provides. This would involve completing this playlist and improving the quality of all its video presentations. More importantly will be getting other content creators to understand that. Those who are convinced of the value of NETS could develop content describing NETS to their audiences. We welcome any person who would like to help in any of these areas.

NETS reduces the likelihood of any collision involving a moving NETS vehicle, in any year, to near zero. The safety of a transportation system is related to any collisions between a moving vehicle and some other object. That object may be mobile like another vehicle, a pedestrian, cyclist, or animal. It could also be stationary like a tree, post, building or even the ground. There are a range of safety outcomes from collisions, and some of those can be mitigated by systems like seat belts and airbags. NETS avoids the need for those by addressing collision causes.

Collision causes are dominated by human error, either by the vehicle driver, or a 3rd party like a pedestrian or cyclist. Weather and mechanical failures are much less frequent causes. These all lead to potential collisions. The vehicle driver may still be able to avoid the collision. To do that requires detection of the potential, and an avoidance response.

This video specifies how NETS addresses all the collision causes, and ensures that early detection, and rapid avoidance measures are ensured if, or when, a potential collision arises. This involves the introduction of the two main NETS modes: LAN, a last mile; system, and WAN. WAN uses elevated tracked guideways with only 3D crossings. Those run primarily along the side of, and above, all CUTS major roads. The safety mechanisms for LAN and WAN are different as described in the video.

For passengers WAN and LAN operate like a high speed continent wide taxi service. This means any trip, to anywhere in the same landmass, can be started on-demand, 24x7, have a sub-minute response, and be picked up and dropped off at any NETS passenger loading or unloading point. Those are typically near building entrances. NETS AIR extends the on-demand 24x7 model to travel between landmasses.

This video gives a high level view of NETS trips of various lengths. For trip lengths in the 10s of kilometers average speeds would approach 180 kph. For trips in the 100s to about 2000 kms the average speeds would approach 450 kph. Longer trips use planes for the long leg, but have the above speeds before and after the flight, with frequent departures to all destinations. All door to door trip times would be shorter than the best CUTS options available today.

The elimination of CUTS safety motivated speed limits, and any 2D crossing or intersection, enable these speeds. The primary mechanism that achieves the top speeds is based on having multiple tracks with staged speeds. The detailed specification of that, and all other trip time considerations, are in the video linked at the end.

The detailed specification of NETS trip time mechanisms. These include the ability to have the initial vehicle, within settlements, at the pickup point in under a minute, for all passenger trips. The staged speed mechanism is specified along with the sets of 5 unique guideway track configurations. The nominal speeds, and the use, of each track are specified for each configuration. This is what allows top speed tracks on most guideways to run at 180 or 450 kph.

NETS costs would amount to no more than $60 on non-intercity tracks and about $150 per 10,000 vehicle-km on the 450 kph intercity tracks. For reference, direct CUTS personal vehicle costs are in the range of $3,000 to $5,000 per 10,000 vehicle-km. Transportation system costs are broken down along the dimensions of asset build, maintenance and operations for the three asset classes of vehicles, network elements and energy supply, storage and distribution. The build and maintenance costs are amortized over vehicle-kms.

The noted CUTS personal vehicle costs do not include the network elements but do include energy. The roads, rail lines, ports and station costs are generally covered as some form of tax. The NETS network costs are included.

NETS has no operating cost, associated with human labour, as all vehicle control and goods handling is automated. The energy cost of operations is turned into the capital cost of providing sufficient renewable electricity production, storage and distribution to points of demand. The build costs of each asset class are specified in detail in separate videos on each class. All are optimized by exploiting the small mass and size of even fully loaded vehicles.

These videos confirm the noted costs.

That cost is so low that we believe it should not be paid for directly by passengers, at least for trips within a landmass. It would be far simpler just to have all such travel be free. This ensures that trip costs would never be a factor in a decision regarding taking any such trip.

The payment of the fee, to offset the NETS capital and maintenance costs, could then come in a number of forms. Probably the most reasonable would be to charge a small amortization fee for goods shipments. The level of these could be set so that it would never add more than 1%, or likely much less, to the cost of any purchased item. This would be a smaller fraction than the CUTS costs currently hidden in goods and to some degree services costs. The single big question would be where to set the tax. This should be based on: deciding how quickly we want the day of full capital cost repayment.

At one extreme we could also decide to just pay the capital costs immediately out of existing tax revenues.

The NETS infrastructure would be exploited in the construction of efficient electricity and information distribution networks, able to support NETS demands and easily expand to support other needs. It replaces the largest costs for such systems, which include the structural elements and the rights of ways.

WAN & LAN could be deployed in any region in 2028. AIR and some elements of NETS-E could take until 2030. A new high speed WAN backbone could be deployed at some later date.

The NETS conclusion which summarizes how all claims, made in the introduction, are achieved by the specified design. We introduce how NETS would provide a basis for changes, in how our society operates, that would improve the quality of life of every person. The improvement is greatest for the poorest, but even the richest would benefit.