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.wikipe

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).