Futuristic travel

I think some kind of continuously running narrow gauge rail system might be in the future (as it was in the past), including replacing some of the current highway lanes. Also, electric buses. Cars might get very small; basically souped-up golf carts.

Y'know, it's kinda funny, but my characters get around by foot a lot.

And trains.

It might be time for trams to make a comeback.

And alleycat, have you seen this: Segway/GM car? Not sure where this is in the revamped GM plans, but it certainly looks like a golf cart.

Doable as long as there is a positionning system that tells the cars at which altitude to fly. Think of it as rolling along on invisible highways, and you merge onto other highways at different altitudes as needed. All one needs is a guidance system combined with a GPS-style point-to-point destination method. Show this up on a HUD and it becomes a matter of following the big purple line in front of you. The sparser the surrounding area, the quicker the car may go, thus attaining airplane speeds on the countryside or over oceans, just like airliners. For security, a handful of parachutes and an emergency broadcasting system that warns of the disabled vehicle allows others to avoid it as it lands.

I see things as automated, whether it's personal cars, busses, trains, trams, or "personal aircraft" as in the Jetsons. Recent DARPA Challenges have shown the technology is feasible on standard urban roads without any "external" help such as electronic signals from the road or other cars. But I think those external things will be installed as part of redundancy and safety, and cars will drive themselves. You enter a destination and it will dynamically change the path it takes depending on changing traffic patterns to get you there the soonest (or using the least fuel, if you wanna be green). A system failure could be dramatic and would be the lead story in the news, but overall, accidents and travel-related deaths and injuries will go WAY down due to no more driving-while-drinking, on drugs, cell-phoning, texting, eating, mind wandering, etc. With fewer people dying in auto accidents, this will inadvertently add to the problems of funding Social Security.

Likewise with personal aircraft, they can only be flown automatically by the computer. In fact, some paranoid people will demand that ALL airplanes no longer be manually flown, as they see too much terrorism potential in someone flying something into a nuclear power plant, even if it only has the weight of an ultralight.

Only daredevils will actually drive their own vehicles, and doing so will only be legal on private roads and tracks.

Anti-grav boots when the weather is nice.

The Tube Transport System from Futurama.

As for flying cars...people in general are lazy, and I don't see many people doing the proper maintenance, leading to a string of disastrous, thousands-dead flying car pileups when some vital system fails because of a lack of maintenance.

To combat this, they would need to have some sort of automatic maintenance drone robot or something that comes with each car or is provided by the government and takes care of problems as they appear, rather than 'next week' i.e. 'when I remember two months from now'.

i'm kinda bored in fiction with the flying cars thing. I'm also very suspicious (it doesn't seem reasonable) that everyone would have all that *stuff.* So intra-world travel, in a wip i'm happy with, would generally be on foot or by public transport. It just seems more reasonable, given, as redpbass says, the amount of lazy or even financially strapped people who couldn't or wouldn't keep up their maintenance.

The ultra-rich and important, otoh, will always have private transport.

But why not some variation on instantaneous transport? I was always a mite disbelieving of something for the masses (too much stuff going hither and yon) but privately? Could work, especially in-planet and with stations at both ends.

They're actually working, i hear, on a practical application of theoretical formulas for it, now.

cat

redpbass said:

As for flying cars...people in general are lazy, and I don't see many people doing the proper maintenance, leading to a string of disastrous, thousands-dead flying car pileups when some vital system fails because of a lack of maintenance.

To combat this, they would need to have some sort of automatic maintenance drone robot or something that comes with each car or is provided by the government and takes care of problems as they appear, rather than 'next week' i.e. 'when I remember two months from now'.

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How about the car just refuses to start if required maintenance hasn't been performed, or if the car detects a serious fault in its systems? If it has a failure in the air, it lands on the nearest platform.

Distopia = buses and elevated trains that smell of urine. Or off road trucks and bicycles.

Shiny future = Asimov style moving sidewalks or white bubble shaped self-driving cars

And trains, the future is full of trains. The trucker's union fell apart. In fact, nearly all future worlds are free of unions. Hmm.

Wark said:

And trains, the future is full of trains. The trucker's union fell apart. In fact, nearly all future worlds are free of unions. Hmm.

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Not necessarily. Like the mule-skinner's proto-union didn't fall apart--they just morphed into the trucker's unions.

And what about train-engineer's unions?


I love the idea of moving sidewalks, tho. I've always loved moving sidewalks. They sound horribly impractical, but boy, would i loves 'em in my world. The whole world would be like vegas, baby! (which means half of them would be out of order at any one time.

You have to consider the context of the 'urbanised' setting, I think. Will the pace of suburbanisation slow or reverse in the future? I think it's likely, personally, and mass transit will again become the commonest modality in Western cities. On the other hand, if we magically solve our energy issues and everyone lives on a ten acre spread in the mountains, then commuting by flying vehicle might become economical. Might. In a typically dense urban setting, though, the image of millions of idiots all behind the joystick of their own flying machines is just outlandish.

Albedo said:

You have to consider the context of the 'urbanised' setting, I think. Will the pace of suburbanisation slow or reverse in the future? I think it's likely, personally, and mass transit will again become the commonest modality in Western cities. On the other hand, if we magically solve our energy issues and everyone lives on a ten acre spread in the mountains, then commuting by flying vehicle might become economical. Might. In a typically dense urban setting, though, the image of millions of idiots all behind the joystick of their own flying machines is just outlandish.

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People forget, too, that urbanization's generally what allows mechanization. Completely self-sufficient factories and all the self-sufficient mining etc that feeds raw materials to those factories is a pipe dream, imho. There'd have to be human monitoring and maintenance (and decision making, unless you want to leave it up to machines where to mine? What if they find raw materials on your ten acre spread?)

Unless we wanna go back to a few thousand people living on ten acre spreads who live subsistence lives, like the 18th century. Then we'd have all those horses and mules and oxen, again, to produce manure for our gardens. And that's what we'd get around on, instead of flying machines.

I likes the ideas i've seen in some discovery-channel eco-promotion pieces: High rises that act as gardens on every 10th floor or the like. Scientists have presently done wonders with water-only crops, and in cities where there's a lot of rainfall, that would work, imho.

And i've seen houses where crops planted around the inside of the house's walls are used in lieu of air conditioning and air and water filtration systems, often doing a better job than artificial systems.

In such a place, an eco-paradise, what would be used to get around? I'd vote for solar-powered sliding sidewalks or those little cars on rails or even intercity platform-to-platform teleportation. Heh.

But what would the Big Problem be in such a nice place?

cathyfreeze said:

But what would the Big Problem be in such a nice place?

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You could have a group of people who believe that such techno-marvels are contributing to the downfall of society. And some of those might be the militant overzealous types who actively firebomb and/or sabotage teleport platforms and the like.