100 Years of Travel: A Critical Evolution
Explore the evolution of travel over the last century and imagine what the future holds for clean energy transport!
A coal-burning steam train from Utah. A Great Lakes steamer threading through four of the five Great Lakes. A transatlantic crossing. All just to reach a missionary posting in Austria.
That was 1927. The trip took weeks, burned enormous quantities of fossil fuel, and was considered entirely normal. Today, you'd book a nonstop flight from Salt Lake City to Vienna, arrive in roughly 11 hours, and complain about the legroom.
The distance hasn't changed. Everything else has.
A Century of Change: The Journey Begins
The early 20th-century traveler operated in a world defined by infrastructure constraints. Rail networks were the arteries of civilization — coal-powered, slow by modern standards, but revolutionary compared to what came before. Ocean liners were the only viable option for intercontinental travel. A journey from the American interior to Central Europe wasn't a weekend trip; it was an expedition, requiring planning, patience, and significant expense. Only certain kinds of people traveled internationally: missionaries, merchants, diplomats, and emigrants who were often never coming back.
What often gets overlooked is how profoundly the difficulty of travel shaped cultural assumptions about the world. When your hometown was genuinely far from everywhere else, "foreign" meant something visceral. The planet felt large because it functionally was large — measured in weeks, not hours.
That psychological distance mattered. It shaped policy, prejudice, business, and diplomacy in ways that are hard to fully appreciate from a 21st-century vantage point where Paris is a day trip from New York.
Key Shifts in Transportation Technologies
The automobile democratized short-range movement in a way nothing before it had. By the 1950s, the American interstate system was under construction — a $25 billion federal project that would eventually span 48,000 miles and fundamentally reorganize how people lived relative to where they worked. Suburbs became viable. Road trips became a cultural institution. The car didn't just change how people traveled; it changed where people chose to build their lives.
Commercial aviation did the same thing for long distances. The Boeing 707 entered passenger service in 1958. By the late 1960s, transatlantic air travel had overtaken ocean liner travel for the first time. The economics were brutal for the shipping lines and transformative for everyone else. A journey that once required a week at sea could now be completed before the business day in your destination city had ended.
These weren't incremental improvements — they were complete replacements of the dominant paradigm, happening within a single human lifetime.
The internal combustion engine powered nearly all of it. Which brings us to the part of this story that's still being written.
The clean energy transition is now doing to fossil-fuel transportation what aviation did to ocean liners. Electric vehicles crossed 10 million annual global sales in 2022 — roughly 14% of all new car sales worldwide. Battery costs have dropped over 90% since 2010. The Tesla Model S, which seemed exotic a decade ago, is now a used car with 200,000 miles on someone's odometer. Meanwhile, electric aviation — once dismissed as physically impossible at commercial scale — has cleared meaningful milestones, with hybrid-electric regional aircraft in testing and hydrogen fuel cell planes advancing through certification pipelines.
The transition isn't complete. But it's no longer theoretical.
Environmental Impact and Sustainability
Here's the uncomfortable arithmetic that a century of travel progress produced: global aviation alone now accounts for approximately 2.5% of CO2 emissions — and that number undercounts total climate impact when you factor in contrail formation and NOx emissions at altitude, which some researchers believe roughly doubles aviation's effective warming contribution.
Road transport accounts for roughly 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions. When the Utah missionary's father boarded that coal-burning train in 1927, the cumulative carbon footprint of human transportation was a rounding error compared to what it would become. The very technologies that shrank the world also changed its atmosphere.
This isn't an argument against travel — it's an argument for taking the clean energy transition in transportation seriously, because the stakes are actually that high.
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is currently the most viable near-term pathway for commercial aviation decarbonization. The challenge: SAF currently costs two to four times more than conventional jet fuel and represents less than 1% of total aviation fuel consumption. Scaling that requires policy support, investment infrastructure, and — critically — time.
Electric vehicles are further along. In Norway, EVs now account for over 80% of new car sales. The grid is the constraint, not the vehicle technology. Decarbonizing transportation means decarbonizing electricity generation simultaneously, which is why infrastructure investment in solar, battery storage, and grid modernization isn't separate from the travel story — it *is* the travel story.
The Future of Travel: 2026 and Beyond
A trip to France in 2026 looks meaningfully different from that 1927 journey — and it's beginning to look different from a 2015 trip, too.
High-speed rail in Europe has continued expanding. France's TGV network, which already connects Paris to Lyon in under two hours (a distance that would take roughly five hours by car), is pushing toward new routes and higher frequencies. For continental European travel, rail is increasingly competitive with air on both time and carbon footprint — once you factor in airport transit time, security, and the fact that train stations are typically in city centers rather than 30 miles outside them.
Urban mobility is being rebuilt from the ground up. Shared e-mobility, autonomous vehicle pilots, and electrified public transit are converging in major cities. The 2026 traveler in Paris is likely navigating a combination of metro, electric bus, e-bike share, and possibly autonomous taxi — none of which existed in any meaningful form when that missionary made his journey a century ago.
The next frontier isn't faster travel — it's cleaner travel at comparable speeds, which turns out to be a harder engineering and policy problem than simply going faster.
Electric short-haul aviation is the wildcard. Startups like Heart Aerospace and Eviation are targeting regional routes under 300 miles — exactly the market segment where aviation's carbon cost is highest relative to the distance covered, and where rail or electric vehicles could theoretically compete. Whether these aircraft reach commercial viability by 2026 is uncertain. That they'll exist in meaningful form by 2030 seems increasingly likely.
Personal Stories: Travel Through Generations
There's something worth sitting with in the image of that 1927 missionary. He was making a journey that required extraordinary effort, leaving a community where most people would never travel internationally. He had no way to communicate in real-time with family back in Utah County. No GPS. No Google Translate. No way to check whether his connecting steamer was delayed.
He made the trip anyway. And presumably, it changed him in ways that a comfortable, frictionless journey might not have.
The generational comparison cuts both ways. Ease of travel has produced remarkable things: global scientific collaboration, cultural exchange at unprecedented scale, and tourism economies that support millions of livelihoods. It has also, arguably, made travel feel ordinary in a way that diminishes it. When anywhere is a day away, nowhere feels particularly far.
The travelers who will make the most consequential journeys in the next century probably won't be defined by how fast they can move — but by what they do when they get there.
What's genuinely exciting about the clean energy transition in transportation isn't just the environmental benefit, though that's real and urgent. It's that it represents another complete renegotiation of what travel means, costs, and requires. The steam train passenger in 1927, the jet traveler in 1967, the EV driver in 2025 — each inhabits a fundamentally different relationship with distance.
The next version of that relationship is being built right now, in battery labs, aviation certification offices, and high-speed rail planning departments. It will probably look nothing like what any of us currently expect.
That's the part of the story still ahead.
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