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INTRODUCTION This report is concerned with the importance of accelerating the develop- ment of rapid-excavation technology in order to mitigate the growing na- tional concern for the quality of the environment and how to maintain and enhance it. As the nation's gross national product (GNP) inaeases and discretionary expenditures become a larger portion of total expenditures, national concern for the quality of the environment increases at a faster rate than the rates of growth of the economic expenditures that generate the concern. This concern reflects wide recognition that America is very rapidly urbanisdng and that more and more of its citizens live in environments highly transformed by man - the environments of large urban areas. The nation is now at an advanced stage of urbanization - metropolitaniza- tion - where a high proportion of the total population is concentrated in a relatively small number of metropolitan areas of SOO,0(X) people or more. Moreover, the nation has begun to move into an even more advanced stage of urbanization - megalopolitanization - in which a majority of the population lives in a handful of urban complexes covering large geographical areas and comprising dozens of large cities, hundreds of small cities and towns, and thousands of suburbs, all merged together. This urbanization trend poses problems of great complexity to the nation. Certainly one problem is related to the construction of the physical plant re- quired by the urban complex: how to create transportation and utility sys- tems (not to mention myriad buildings and structures) efficiently and eco- nomically without disrupting living patterns or defiling the natural environment. This problem is complicated by the unfashioned urban growth pattern that
2 RAPID EXCAVATION exhibits kaleidoscopic mixtures of land use. Certainly another problem is re- lated to the mining of resources required by the industrial sector that financial- ly and materially supported the urbanization process: how to tap mineral resources efficiently and economically without disfiguring the countryside. But problems related to construction and mining demands have a conunon, largely unrecognized element - the inability of planners of urban and resource development to recognize the capabilities that could be technologically possible tomonow. Planners tend to consider solutions to pressing problems only in terms of current technological capabilities, even though the terminal date of their plans may be 20 years in the future. Furthermore, planners tend to think of cunent and future technologies as being "given" to the planner by fate and science, and not as being under the control of policy makers. Actually, plans coming to fruition 20 years from now ought to consider al- ternatives that make use of technology that could become available by the planned time period. In fact, a modem country can and should use its scientific resources to innovate in the areas it selects - to guide the development of technology in such a way that national goals are efGciently and economically realizable. Experts as well as the general public ought to inquire into what is needed to relax current technological constraints, not simply assuming that such constraints are immutable. Frequently it will be cheapter to remove a technological constraint than to build extensively around it. Excavation technology, a fundamental constituent of construction and mining activities, is a case in point. There now exist large differences between the rates of technological progress of surface and subsurface excavation and between the current and potential rates of technological progress of subsurface excavation. These differences are related and are quite observable. For many years, the unit cost of surface excavation has been appreciably lower than that of underground excavation. For a long time, surface excava- tion and the physical facilities and resource-development methods utilizing surface-excavation technology have received ever greater consideration by corporate and government planners concerned with urban and resource devel- opment. These effects have been partly due to the geological and physical con- siderations attending underground excavation, partly to the nature of the de- mand for underground facilities, and partly to the progress of technological developments associated with alternative activities. These factors, in turn, have influenced the mechanisms for innovation developed by the private sector so that these mechanisms now differ for surface and subsurface activities. The net result is that demands for underground excavation from the con- struction or resource sectors are residual, i.e., projects are planned as subsur- face only when there is practically no other alternative. However, current con- cern about environment is providing an appreciable increase in the number of
INTRODUCTION 3 such residual pubUc needs as parking spaces and water and vehicle tunnels. Moreover, new needs are being defined that seemingly can be satisfied only by placing greater demands on underground«xcavation technology. These needs include requirements for hardened missile sites, defense control centers, and exploitation of very large mineral deposits under conservation constraints. In most of these proposals, all costs are passed on to state or federal tax-payers, and these costs are on the rise. This rapid, simultaneous rise in demand, as well as in price, supports the observation that the price-demand relationship for underground excavation is highly inelastic. Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to ask: What is the significance of undergroimd-excavation technology to the public interest? How much of the cost of underground excavation could be cut by accelerating the develop- ment of improved underground-excavation technology? How much would it cost to develop the technology? What areas of research have the highest priority? How should the research be financed? What is the appropriate mechanism for exploiting research results? What are the incentives and returns associated with public and industrial interest in improvements?
