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I agree with the author, and am cognizant of the problem and outraged for the same inefficiencies, deleterious health effects, and fatalities he outlines. But I

I agree with the author, and am cognizant of the problem and outraged for the same inefficiencies, deleterious health effects, and fatalities he outlines. But I wish he could have spent an equal amount of time exploring how we solve this problem rather than just inciting futile anger over it. One solution is telecommuting; get people of the road by having them work from home. Another is mandating fuel efficiency and reducing the pollution cars produce. It's outrageous that children getting leukemia and respiratory illnesses are considered acceptable loses so that people can drive enormous SUVs purely as status symbols instead of for their utility. You want to drive a vehicle that gets less than 20 MPG? Fine, you're also going to pay a gasoline consumption tax to support the social programs that take care of the families your pollution is giving cancer. Most importantly to me, and the point the author leaves out, is that cars are highly subsidized. The irony of American car ownership is that we consider public transportation socialist, while spending trillions of tax dollars on public roads. I would love to take the train to work, where I can read a book, write, or program instead of sitting in traffic for an hour... but for some reason we consider sitting in traffic for an hour on a publicly-funded road "freedom."

zzalpha 10y ago
IMO, if you wanted to change things, you'd have to penalize driving by eliminating subsidies and/or introduce taxes on non-commercial vehicles and fuel. Then pair that with policies that discourage urban sprawl and encourage investment in public transportation. We know this can work because the run up on crude caused miles driven to decline. But that requires some serious political will, and that ain't gonna happen.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Taxes are also a problematic solution because they tend to be regressive. Poor people often can't afford efficient cars and living in a place with good public transportation is a luxury in many places. Poor people's jobs are not typically the ones that allow telecommuting. In general I'm a fan of taxing pollutants to account for their true costs, but it's not as straightforward as it might appear.
  - fulafel 10y ago
    A corresponding increase in income transfers or income tax progression can be used to offset this effect. Then the low pressure ncome person can choose to use the increased income to pay for gas price increase or use it for something else.
- lagadu 10y ago
  The problem is that it's too late. Urban sprawl already grew so much that it's out of hand, it looks next to impossible to make a public transportation network that would rival the ones we have on our side of the pond. It's not just lack of political (and voter) will, it's simply the sheer impracticality of implementing it.
  - theseatoms 10y ago
    I don't see how these problems are insurmountable with a gradually increasing carbon tax. (Setting aside the issue of political will.)
    - chrisbennet 10y ago
      Wouldn't that be tantamount to making it too expensive to live in the country?
  - Agustus 10y ago
    Then why are there discussions on gentrification. There are reasons why individuals are moving back into the city, especially the up and coming class of individuals. The new comers to the city are fighting urban sprawl by making the move.
    - lagadu 10y ago
      It's a small minority. Even more interesting, while gentrification is arguably the solution/balancing phenomena to this problem, it's generally speaking a term with a negative connotation associated with it.
      - zzalpha 10y ago
        Only because most US cities do a piss poor job of providing housing support for the poor. That's a failure of policy, not gentrification itself.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  The problem here is that discouraging people from driving is going to cause serious problems, because they aren't going to move closer: the housing is too expensive. Just look at all the problems with housing prices in California in the news lately. Seriously, who really wants to spend so much time sitting in traffic? But in many places, it simply isn't affordable to live close to work, and the design of our cities makes dense living infeasible or impossible. This is a failure of government, and I don't see how it's possible to fix it because we aren't electing people who will, we're electing people who perpetuate the status quo at best.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
btbuildem 10y ago
Jack the gas price to $10/gallon, use the proceeds to fund non-car things.
- splintercell 10y ago
  What are your thoughts on War on Drugs?
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    Whats your point?
    - splintercell 10y ago
      I think you got my point.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- imtringued 10y ago
  I don't agree with the exact number but yes. I think germany is a good example, expensive gas prices counteracted by very efficient cars.
  - lagadu 10y ago
    By European standards Germany doesn't have expensive gas at all[1] :) [1]: http://autotraveler.ru/en/spravka/fuel-price-in-europe.html http://autotraveler.ru/en/spravka/fuel-price-in-europe.html
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    But even in Germany the green party had their most devastating election result when they include a stepwise increase for the gas price to 5 DM (gas price was at ~1.3 DM at this time) in their party platform.
massysett 10y ago
Telecommuting is no solution. People travel to work because it has economic and social benefits. Not everyone wants to provide office space at home. I am in favor of telecommuting if it is offered to make life better for the employee or to improve the employer's profitability. However, I often see it advanced as a transportation policy. On that front, it fails because its objective is to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs. Since the beginning of time, humans have embraced transportation because it improves their quality of life. Any policy that seeks to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs is literally retrograde and reactionary.
- surge 10y ago
  Co-lo offices might be a decent compromise for those situations, but yeah its not for everyone.
lagadu 10y ago
> You want to drive a vehicle that gets less than 20 MPG? Fine, you're also going to pay a gasoline consumption tax to support the social programs that take care of the families your pollution is giving cancer. The US doesn't have a yearly road tax based on emissions? I'm a bit surprised, seems so obvious.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Of course not. Taxes are evil, cars are awesome, and climate change is a myth, so why would you do that?
- ericabiz 10y ago
  We don't, but the gas tax here is per gallon, so less fuel-efficient cars pay more in taxes. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to deter SUV drivers, since gas here is so cheap to begin with.
- nfriedly 10y ago
  There are tons of taxes on gasoline, so you do pay more taxes to drive a low MPG vehicle. It's not quite what the parent meant, but it is something. Gasoline is one of the few products sold in the US where the advertised price includes the taxes, and I suspect that's because people would flip out if they realized how much of their fuel cost was taxes.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    "Tons of taxes" is relative. US gasoline taxes are about 50 cents/gallon on average (depends on the locality), so at current prices they're about 33%. Taking Germany as a random example, gas taxes there are €0.6545 per liter plus 19% VAT, making for a total tax rate well beyond 100%.
tajen 10y ago
> mandating fuel efficiency Despite your other excellent points, this one is "typical American", even though you might not be American. I once went to a conference from Jancovici (He did an excellent job at touring France to explain what the global warming was, its origins, and its solutions), here's an example of his 1.30hrs session: - 1st slide: The awesome downwards curve of car consumption. Individual consumption was divided by, like, 10 in 40 years. Great! - 2nd slide: The shameful exponential curve of total car petrol consumption. The he stops and asks people what they think. Of course cheaper cars means more cars on the road and any improvement leads to more consumption! When you're in the audience you're compelled to reckon that no fuel efficiency whatsoever will solve anything related to car transportation. Here's the rest of the conference, in case you're interested: - 3rd slide: Basic physics calculations about moving 1t of iron through the streets. Then on and on with half the city space spent in parkings, 3/4 of the city space designated to car transportation, while only 20% inhabitants move around with a car and the rest 80% move around with public transportation. And the accident rate. So basically the individual transportation is the weapon with which we commit suicide. It doesn't matter how much, since it's an order of magnitude more than any other way of life. - 4th slide: Solution is mass transit. High density. Shield a question about "mass transit pollutes too". Shield another with "But people want green lawn". Shield the most important one about "Big cities pollute the most", but let's come to that later. - 5th slide: Microeconomy crash course about the offer curve, the demand curve, the point where they meet. And how tax alters them. Take the example of how tax on wages lower both the demand and the offer of employment, and create massive unemployment in Europe. - 6th slide: Externalities of the carbon market that should have been included in the cost of the cars. The subventions like you say, the cancers you mentionned, the accidents: Excellent points. Don't forget the road police is currently funded by a flat tax on all citizen, preventing renewables from progressing. So is the DoD, which costs trilions to attack so many countries for petrol. Plus the cost of terrorism, mainly due to attacking countries for petrol. All that should be included in the cost of car per km. - 7th slide: "If we had a carbon tax", for every liter of gas/petrol/fuel, it would lower the demand for petrol and the offer. We could alleviate taxes on wages, because employment is a complementary alternative to fossils. And we want employment while we don't want fossil energy, and we want externalities to be paid by fossil energy. Tax on petrol is the tax which is the most "even" per pollution unit, which also means the least costly to implement. Petrol taxes are higher in Europe than in US, which means we're architcturing our cities differently, and that takes dozen years, which means our cities are more ready in the face of fossils-independence. And that's why you're so focussed on "car efficiency" while Europe is a little more focussed on getting rid of the car altogether. (although I reckon we're both far from doing enough) - And a few more slides about how electricity is better than fossils (hint: Yes electricity is often made from coal, but since it's centralized they can lead to much better ways of designing an ecological procurement); how cities with no cars would be nicer, more economically efficient, with more "good" mixity, more fair to the Third World (read: USA's pretense of WMDs in Irak), and how advance on renewables can be a strategic commercial/geopolitic advance in the 3rd millenium. How a blind approach to it puts the 2050-world through a series of riots and Arab Springs. - Last slide: While we're at it, let's mention that hydroelectric dams are ecologic up until 10km3, and harmful beyond that, because there's always someone in those conference who's skeptic "because dams hurt the nature". Conclusion: Drop the ideas of regulating the market with pollution limits, consumption per km, laws about architecture. Only an expensive petrol will trigger the right and most efficient changes, and they all revolve around city architecture and lower footprint. Also drop the idea that a rise in the cost of petrol will lower the demand. Even a $100 barrel doesn't accurately picture the amount of externalities. Even at $100 a barrel, you need to add taxes to compensate the state for the deaths, accidents, cancers, wars and social inequalities created by fossil energy, so that other forms of energy don't bear this cost.
Agustus 10y ago
Fuel efficiency and pollution mandates already occur through the Corporate Average Fuel Economy. Vehicles today, through the standards, are so much better than they were before. In fact, when people now try to commit suicide by locking themselves in a garage with the car on, there is enough leaks in a garage that it is near impossible. [1] Telecommuting works, but it has been proven to have deleterious effects on workers and their progression within a company. If you are willing to take a risk on your career, then do it. Cars are not subsidized. Gas is taxed as a usage fee at the state (14%), Federal (12%), and local (2%). Public roads are paid for by its users, however, the plateauing of revenues because of the CAFE standards has lead to the development of toll based roadways, which do not need subsidies. Public transportation is socialist as it takes money from the gas taxes paid for by the public roadway users and heavily subsidizes public transportation. There is always a discussion to raise the rates on public transportation users to fully pay for its costs, but there is an outcry from its users. This is not to say that I am against it, public transit provides employment opportunities to low-income individuals who are not able to afford vehicle access. This is a public good that I am okay with using my taxes for. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy [2] http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gastax.pdf http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gastax.pdf
turar 10y ago
Here's one sensible approach: http://www.terrain.org/articles/28/tachieva.htm http://www.terrain.org/articles/28/tachieva.htm
Grishnakh 10y ago
The answer is simple, but no one takes it seriously. It's PRT (personal rapid transit) called SkyTran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran Nothing else will work outside of extremely dense cities like Manhattan (even outside of Manhattan in the rest of NYC, the existing public transit doesn't work very well). You need a system that gets people to their destination quickly, is on-demand, and uses low energy, in order to overcome the place in society that the automobile occupies today. SkyTran is the only thing that can do that. Subways don't work: they cost an absolute fortune to build, and only work in extremely dense areas. They run on regular schedules, and stop at every stop, so they aren't very fast. And they're linear; they don't work too well in a situation where a city is laid out in a large grid, unlike Manhattan which is a narrow island. Buses don't work: they're horribly slow, they don't maintain a consistent schedule, they take convoluted paths to try to maximize ridership at the expense of travel time. The only things they have going for them are capital cost and reconfigurability: it doesn't cost anything to deploy them because they use existing streets, and you can change the routes easily (it's more trouble to inform riders of the new route and change the signage than it is to change the route of the bus itself). Buses also are gas guzzlers and terrible polluters: it's better for the environment for all the bus riders to drive themselves in a reasonably modern car, unless it's an electric bus. Light rail doesn't work: it costs a fortune to build (not quite as bad as subways), it puts local businesses out of business during construction, it disrupts other street traffic, it's almost as slow as buses (light rail has to stop for traffic lights just like cars). SkyTran is the answer to all of this: it only costs $1M per mile to build (compare that to subway or light rail costs), it's electric powered, it's very low-energy (uses the equivalent of two hair dryers to go 100mph), it's on-demand (you can call a car with your smartphone), it takes you directly where you want to go with no stops, it doesn't force you to share space with strangers, and the system is fully automated. Unfortunately, everyone dismisses it as "impossible" while simultaneously wanting to spend hundreds of billions on high-speed rail, light rail, and Hyperloop, things that are either unappealing to users or just plain sci-fi (whereas SkyTran has actually been demonstrated to work and uses existing technology, and really isn't all that complicated).

zzalpha 10y ago

IMO, if you wanted to change things, you'd have to penalize driving by eliminating subsidies and/or introduce taxes on non-commercial vehicles and fuel. Then pair that with policies that discourage urban sprawl and encourage investment in public transportation. We know this can work because the run up on crude caused miles driven to decline. But that requires some serious political will, and that ain't gonna happen.

mikeash 10y ago
Taxes are also a problematic solution because they tend to be regressive. Poor people often can't afford efficient cars and living in a place with good public transportation is a luxury in many places. Poor people's jobs are not typically the ones that allow telecommuting. In general I'm a fan of taxing pollutants to account for their true costs, but it's not as straightforward as it might appear.
- fulafel 10y ago
  A corresponding increase in income transfers or income tax progression can be used to offset this effect. Then the low pressure ncome person can choose to use the increased income to pay for gas price increase or use it for something else.
lagadu 10y ago
The problem is that it's too late. Urban sprawl already grew so much that it's out of hand, it looks next to impossible to make a public transportation network that would rival the ones we have on our side of the pond. It's not just lack of political (and voter) will, it's simply the sheer impracticality of implementing it.
- theseatoms 10y ago
  I don't see how these problems are insurmountable with a gradually increasing carbon tax. (Setting aside the issue of political will.)
  - chrisbennet 10y ago
    Wouldn't that be tantamount to making it too expensive to live in the country?
- Agustus 10y ago
  Then why are there discussions on gentrification. There are reasons why individuals are moving back into the city, especially the up and coming class of individuals. The new comers to the city are fighting urban sprawl by making the move.
  - lagadu 10y ago
    It's a small minority. Even more interesting, while gentrification is arguably the solution/balancing phenomena to this problem, it's generally speaking a term with a negative connotation associated with it.
    - zzalpha 10y ago
      Only because most US cities do a piss poor job of providing housing support for the poor. That's a failure of policy, not gentrification itself.
Grishnakh 10y ago
The problem here is that discouraging people from driving is going to cause serious problems, because they aren't going to move closer: the housing is too expensive. Just look at all the problems with housing prices in California in the news lately. Seriously, who really wants to spend so much time sitting in traffic? But in many places, it simply isn't affordable to live close to work, and the design of our cities makes dense living infeasible or impossible. This is a failure of government, and I don't see how it's possible to fix it because we aren't electing people who will, we're electing people who perpetuate the status quo at best.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

btbuildem 10y ago

Jack the gas price to $10/gallon, use the proceeds to fund non-car things.

splintercell 10y ago
What are your thoughts on War on Drugs?
- tobltobs 10y ago
  Whats your point?
  - splintercell 10y ago
    I think you got my point.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
imtringued 10y ago
I don't agree with the exact number but yes. I think germany is a good example, expensive gas prices counteracted by very efficient cars.
- lagadu 10y ago
  By European standards Germany doesn't have expensive gas at all[1] :) [1]: http://autotraveler.ru/en/spravka/fuel-price-in-europe.html http://autotraveler.ru/en/spravka/fuel-price-in-europe.html
- tobltobs 10y ago
  But even in Germany the green party had their most devastating election result when they include a stepwise increase for the gas price to 5 DM (gas price was at ~1.3 DM at this time) in their party platform.

massysett 10y ago

Telecommuting is no solution. People travel to work because it has economic and social benefits. Not everyone wants to provide office space at home. I am in favor of telecommuting if it is offered to make life better for the employee or to improve the employer's profitability. However, I often see it advanced as a transportation policy. On that front, it fails because its objective is to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs. Since the beginning of time, humans have embraced transportation because it improves their quality of life. Any policy that seeks to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs is literally retrograde and reactionary.

surge 10y ago
Co-lo offices might be a decent compromise for those situations, but yeah its not for everyone.

lagadu 10y ago

> You want to drive a vehicle that gets less than 20 MPG? Fine, you're also going to pay a gasoline consumption tax to support the social programs that take care of the families your pollution is giving cancer. The US doesn't have a yearly road tax based on emissions? I'm a bit surprised, seems so obvious.

mikeash 10y ago
Of course not. Taxes are evil, cars are awesome, and climate change is a myth, so why would you do that?
ericabiz 10y ago
We don't, but the gas tax here is per gallon, so less fuel-efficient cars pay more in taxes. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to deter SUV drivers, since gas here is so cheap to begin with.
nfriedly 10y ago
There are tons of taxes on gasoline, so you do pay more taxes to drive a low MPG vehicle. It's not quite what the parent meant, but it is something. Gasoline is one of the few products sold in the US where the advertised price includes the taxes, and I suspect that's because people would flip out if they realized how much of their fuel cost was taxes.
- mikeash 10y ago
  "Tons of taxes" is relative. US gasoline taxes are about 50 cents/gallon on average (depends on the locality), so at current prices they're about 33%. Taking Germany as a random example, gas taxes there are €0.6545 per liter plus 19% VAT, making for a total tax rate well beyond 100%.

tajen 10y ago

> mandating fuel efficiency Despite your other excellent points, this one is "typical American", even though you might not be American. I once went to a conference from Jancovici (He did an excellent job at touring France to explain what the global warming was, its origins, and its solutions), here's an example of his 1.30hrs session: - 1st slide: The awesome downwards curve of car consumption. Individual consumption was divided by, like, 10 in 40 years. Great! - 2nd slide: The shameful exponential curve of total car petrol consumption. The he stops and asks people what they think. Of course cheaper cars means more cars on the road and any improvement leads to more consumption! When you're in the audience you're compelled to reckon that no fuel efficiency whatsoever will solve anything related to car transportation. Here's the rest of the conference, in case you're interested: - 3rd slide: Basic physics calculations about moving 1t of iron through the streets. Then on and on with half the city space spent in parkings, 3/4 of the city space designated to car transportation, while only 20% inhabitants move around with a car and the rest 80% move around with public transportation. And the accident rate. So basically the individual transportation is the weapon with which we commit suicide. It doesn't matter how much, since it's an order of magnitude more than any other way of life. - 4th slide: Solution is mass transit. High density. Shield a question about "mass transit pollutes too". Shield another with "But people want green lawn". Shield the most important one about "Big cities pollute the most", but let's come to that later. - 5th slide: Microeconomy crash course about the offer curve, the demand curve, the point where they meet. And how tax alters them. Take the example of how tax on wages lower both the demand and the offer of employment, and create massive unemployment in Europe. - 6th slide: Externalities of the carbon market that should have been included in the cost of the cars. The subventions like you say, the cancers you mentionned, the accidents: Excellent points. Don't forget the road police is currently funded by a flat tax on all citizen, preventing renewables from progressing. So is the DoD, which costs trilions to attack so many countries for petrol. Plus the cost of terrorism, mainly due to attacking countries for petrol. All that should be included in the cost of car per km. - 7th slide: "If we had a carbon tax", for every liter of gas/petrol/fuel, it would lower the demand for petrol and the offer. We could alleviate taxes on wages, because employment is a complementary alternative to fossils. And we want employment while we don't want fossil energy, and we want externalities to be paid by fossil energy. Tax on petrol is the tax which is the most "even" per pollution unit, which also means the least costly to implement. Petrol taxes are higher in Europe than in US, which means we're architcturing our cities differently, and that takes dozen years, which means our cities are more ready in the face of fossils-independence. And that's why you're so focussed on "car efficiency" while Europe is a little more focussed on getting rid of the car altogether. (although I reckon we're both far from doing enough) - And a few more slides about how electricity is better than fossils (hint: Yes electricity is often made from coal, but since it's centralized they can lead to much better ways of designing an ecological procurement); how cities with no cars would be nicer, more economically efficient, with more "good" mixity, more fair to the Third World (read: USA's pretense of WMDs in Irak), and how advance on renewables can be a strategic commercial/geopolitic advance in the 3rd millenium. How a blind approach to it puts the 2050-world through a series of riots and Arab Springs. - Last slide: While we're at it, let's mention that hydroelectric dams are ecologic up until 10km3, and harmful beyond that, because there's always someone in those conference who's skeptic "because dams hurt the nature". Conclusion: Drop the ideas of regulating the market with pollution limits, consumption per km, laws about architecture. Only an expensive petrol will trigger the right and most efficient changes, and they all revolve around city architecture and lower footprint. Also drop the idea that a rise in the cost of petrol will lower the demand. Even a $100 barrel doesn't accurately picture the amount of externalities. Even at $100 a barrel, you need to add taxes to compensate the state for the deaths, accidents, cancers, wars and social inequalities created by fossil energy, so that other forms of energy don't bear this cost.

Agustus 10y ago

Fuel efficiency and pollution mandates already occur through the Corporate Average Fuel Economy. Vehicles today, through the standards, are so much better than they were before. In fact, when people now try to commit suicide by locking themselves in a garage with the car on, there is enough leaks in a garage that it is near impossible. [1] Telecommuting works, but it has been proven to have deleterious effects on workers and their progression within a company. If you are willing to take a risk on your career, then do it. Cars are not subsidized. Gas is taxed as a usage fee at the state (14%), Federal (12%), and local (2%). Public roads are paid for by its users, however, the plateauing of revenues because of the CAFE standards has lead to the development of toll based roadways, which do not need subsidies. Public transportation is socialist as it takes money from the gas taxes paid for by the public roadway users and heavily subsidizes public transportation. There is always a discussion to raise the rates on public transportation users to fully pay for its costs, but there is an outcry from its users. This is not to say that I am against it, public transit provides employment opportunities to low-income individuals who are not able to afford vehicle access. This is a public good that I am okay with using my taxes for. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy [2] http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gastax.pdf http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gastax.pdf

turar 10y ago

Here's one sensible approach: http://www.terrain.org/articles/28/tachieva.htm http://www.terrain.org/articles/28/tachieva.htm

Grishnakh 10y ago

The answer is simple, but no one takes it seriously. It's PRT (personal rapid transit) called SkyTran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran Nothing else will work outside of extremely dense cities like Manhattan (even outside of Manhattan in the rest of NYC, the existing public transit doesn't work very well). You need a system that gets people to their destination quickly, is on-demand, and uses low energy, in order to overcome the place in society that the automobile occupies today. SkyTran is the only thing that can do that. Subways don't work: they cost an absolute fortune to build, and only work in extremely dense areas. They run on regular schedules, and stop at every stop, so they aren't very fast. And they're linear; they don't work too well in a situation where a city is laid out in a large grid, unlike Manhattan which is a narrow island. Buses don't work: they're horribly slow, they don't maintain a consistent schedule, they take convoluted paths to try to maximize ridership at the expense of travel time. The only things they have going for them are capital cost and reconfigurability: it doesn't cost anything to deploy them because they use existing streets, and you can change the routes easily (it's more trouble to inform riders of the new route and change the signage than it is to change the route of the bus itself). Buses also are gas guzzlers and terrible polluters: it's better for the environment for all the bus riders to drive themselves in a reasonably modern car, unless it's an electric bus. Light rail doesn't work: it costs a fortune to build (not quite as bad as subways), it puts local businesses out of business during construction, it disrupts other street traffic, it's almost as slow as buses (light rail has to stop for traffic lights just like cars). SkyTran is the answer to all of this: it only costs $1M per mile to build (compare that to subway or light rail costs), it's electric powered, it's very low-energy (uses the equivalent of two hair dryers to go 100mph), it's on-demand (you can call a car with your smartphone), it takes you directly where you want to go with no stops, it doesn't force you to share space with strangers, and the system is fully automated. Unfortunately, everyone dismisses it as "impossible" while simultaneously wanting to spend hundreds of billions on high-speed rail, light rail, and Hyperloop, things that are either unappealing to users or just plain sci-fi (whereas SkyTran has actually been demonstrated to work and uses existing technology, and really isn't all that complicated).