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Perhaps it's just me, but I'd rather have the city of the future resemble Copenhagen or Amsterdam than the Fifth Element urban hell. Congestion in cities like L

Perhaps it's just me, but I'd rather have the city of the future resemble Copenhagen or Amsterdam than the Fifth Element urban hell. Congestion in cities like LA or Dubai are a symptom of poor urban design and national transport policies. Flying cars feel closer to a dystopian band-aid than a solution to the root cause. Also, it's ugly.

nawitus 8y ago
Flying cars are in theory more "efficient" than public transportation, because public transportation doesn't take you directly from your home to your destination unless by accident (e.g. you happen to travel to destination which is right at a public transportation stop). Even then, that route probably doesn't take the shortest path, but rather zigzags through major locations. In addition, it's not realistic to assume every single public transporation line runs 24/7 every 3 minutes, which means you need to plan ahead instead of leaving whenever you want to. In fact, the ideal "public transportation" is a private vehicle, like this kind of a autonomous flying vehicle, which will transport you whenever and wherever you want. It's not a band-aid, it's solving the root cause. Public transportation is the band-aid, which cannot in practise solve the problem ideally.
- RubenSandwich 8y ago
  The ideal "public transportation" being a private vehicle completely ignores climate change issues. Even an electric private vehicle needs to charge from the grid which so far isn't very sustainable, plus each private vehicle needs its own power. The fact of the matter is shared public transportation is the most sustainable option we have.
  - makerofspoons 8y ago
    This is important - the idea that the future is a private flying vehicle is an artifact of 20th century science fiction. It does not fit into 21st century ecological and economic realities.
    - nawitus 8y ago
      Agree with the current level of technology. That's why Boeing is developing new technology to solves these issues.
- Quinner 8y ago
  Private transports are efficient at delivering individuals to locations. Public transport has the advantage of delivering a lot of people to an approximation of their destination. The latter enables more urban density and more efficient cities overall.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    "Private transports are efficient at delivering individuals to locations" Not all locations though - I wouldn't dream of driving to work in central Edinburgh as the drive would be a pain, take longer and the parking would be more expensive than getting the train.
  - nawitus 8y ago
    There's nothing preventing "flying cars" of delivering a lot of people to various locations. 3D space is quite large.
- dbingham 8y ago
  Ideal in terms of travel time efficiency, not energy efficiency or space efficiency. Travel time is the wrong property to optimize for when we're looking at transportation and urban design. It's the mistake we've made in America for the last century. We should be optimizing for quality of life and health. Optimizing for those things yields design like Copenhagen -- bike paths, walking paths, trains and busses for longer trips. It's quiet. It's energy efficiency. It's much better for our health. It encourages healthy social interaction and the feel of community.
  - AlgorithmicTime 8y ago
    Quality of life is optimized by minimizing travel time. Hence, flying cars.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Ideal in terms of travel time efficiency, not energy efficiency or space efficiency. Not even in terms of the first, because of the last; it's the optimal individual choice in terms of travel time, but making it the socially dominant option produces sprawl (because of space inefficiency); and flying doesn't actually change that (because any dense arrangement means high concentration near the endpoints, and because flight in built up areas is problematic.)
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Travel time is the wrong property to optimize for when we're looking at transportation and urban design. You'll probably eat those words. Or maybe your grandchildren or great great grandchildren will. The value of human time has been steadily going up for millennia. We used to have slaves build pyramids and pick cotton, now we use machines. We used to churn our own butter. Now there's enough wealth in the world that we can afford to have butter specialists make butter and logistics specialists get it to the store shelves. Tasks that we used to think it was reasonable to allocate human time and effort two we no wouldn't think about doing manually today. I would be highly surprised if in the future we did not continue to optimize for smaller travel times. Of course there are energy and space trade-offs. I think it's highly likely that we will chose to solve the problems caused by those trade-offs rather than having people endure longer travel times when we have the power to shorten them (with tradeoffs). Spending less and less human time on "overhead" tasks (like churning butter, washing clothes, traveling, etc.) has been a constant theme for millennia. I do not see any reason why that will change.
- yason 8y ago
  Ideally, I'd just walk and use no vehicles at all to be most effective. This assumes lots of services, jobs, and housing all within decent walking distances which is quite common in older (European) cities. Merely walking doesn't scale but the natural extension for longer distances is to walk to a suitable public transit stop, hop on the train/tram/subway, waiting for a while, and continue walking to your destination. This will also effectively double the locations you might be interested in visiting: you can walk around near home and you can walk around near your workplace. So, you can use the most effective mode of transport i.e. walking around hundreds of locations (shops, restaurants, services) but you can also switch the whole area by changing transit to another local centre. It's like looking up stuff really fast in the whole cache line, and then making calculated jumps to read another location into your cache and continuing to traverse locally there.
  - nawitus 8y ago
    Even more ideally you can fly anywhere quickly instead of settling for either long transportation times or walking to whatever is nearby.
    - yason 8y ago
      This would be the case if businesses were scattered around like in the auto-centric USA. There's no way any transport can be more efficient than me walking a couple of blocks and checking out maybe 100 doors to different businesses to be considered on my way.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  That’s not how “efficient” works. Not only do you look at each person individually instead of the whole system, in which everyone having their whole transport is ridiculously inefficient in required space, energy and coordination effort alone, it’s also likely to actually be so incredibly inefficient on the whole system that the value breaks down for each individual person, even if you completely overlook the drastic side effects on the whole system, by not actually getting anybody anywhere in a timely manner. Thinking like this baffles me, I can only hope that you are very young.
  - nawitus 8y ago
    If the vehicle is flying and autonomus (like what Boeing is developing), then there's plenty of space in three dimensions. Coordination should be solvable with software. Energy use is an interesting factor, of course. There are possibilities (like cheap nuclear power) to solve that.
    - anyfoo 8y ago
      Because those vehicles can move in the third dimension as easily as in the other two? Because this wouldn't require an intense amount of coordination between vehicles, and tons and tons of added security measures and protocols, given that cars can now literally fall from the sky and onto each other? Because the resources to build those magic cars are easily and sustainably acquirable? Because this does not need a much more involved inspection and maintenance infrastructure? Because energy considerations has been solved, and things "like cheap nuclear power" are safely and readily available? And the insane amounts of power required are so easy to distribute among those ubiquitous cars? I just don't see how this is "efficient".
      - nawitus 8y ago
        It's true that 2D is a lot easier than 3D. It would also require a lot of new technology. It is a solvable problem, though, and we need to solve it to some degree even today (due to airplanes). The need to solve coordination will only increase thanks to proliferation of drones, too.
- nradov 8y ago
  Due to noise and safety issues, none of these new VTOL aircraft are going to operate in residential neighborhoods. They certainly aren't going to land in your driveway. In some cases they might be a good option for short trips across congested urban areas, but they'll still have to operate from designated landing pads. So they won't do anything to solve the last mile transportation problem.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > In some cases they might be a good option for short trips across congested urban areas Well, if you need to get from an uncongested area to an uncongested area with a congested urban areas in between and no bypass motorway, and no accessible public transit maybe. If either origin or destination is congested adding take-off and landing traffic is just going to make things worse.
knightofmars 8y ago
And noisy unless I'm mistaken.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  That's where Elon's tunnels are undeniably the better 3D alternative.
  - eropple 8y ago
    Sure--insofar as eventually, once they fail, the tunnels are already the correct size for a standard subway car for actual mass transit that can actually help people. 'Cause the on-street traffic jams they would--not "might", check out donoteat01's stuff for a full breakdown--create are not exactly a better situation.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Elon's tunnels are the worst 3D alternative. The hourly capacity of a single city bus exceeds the daily capacity of an Elontunnel. For example: Elon has proposed a tunnel to Dodger stadium. However, the existing Union Station-Stadium shuttles can (and do) handle 10x the proposed Elontunnel's max daily capacity in about an hour or two depending on traffic.
    - jandrese 8y ago
      Is this assuming a single car at a time in the tunnel? Otherwise I don't see how it could possibly be true. That's absurdly low volume. Like a regular road would beat it easily.
      - eropple 8y ago
        Not a single car, but a lot fewer than Elon wants you to believe. We already know that the baseline technology being proposed works. Guided buses have been in use for a long time now. But there's a reason it's used with buses, not individual cars. And it's for a pretty simple reason: the loading process into the tunnels can't be fast. Much hay is being made about minimal surface disruption, but elevators are slow. As is driving into a guide tray that moves the car along. donoteat01 does pretty fantastic video work about a number of urban planning topics and he's shot this one full of holes already. You should watch it if you're curious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs
Pica_soO 8y ago
Its also one hack away from a city filled with cruise missiles..
jandrese 8y ago
LA would probably be a lot easier to get around if it had 1/7 of the people it has now.
- nwah1 8y ago
  Walkability, density, and population are all distinct features of an urban setting. You could have a highly zoned, non-walkable city that is very dense. You could have a lightly populated city that is not walkable because of sprawl (see: all the countless cities defined by "stroads"). Sprawl occurs as a result of tax policy, transportation infrastructure, zoning, and other factors. One could envision a version of LA with less vacant lots, less surface-level or curbside parking, less single-story fast food franchises, etc. One could envision an LA with an efficient transportation like Hong Kong. It is completely possible to achieve livability with a high population and high density. Indeed, that generally will correlate with more cool stuff to do. Reducing population would by no means necessarily lead to walkability or livability.
ta1234567890 8y ago
Completely agree. Also, in a way the future is already here, just take a look at Tokyo, the most populated metro area in the world with 38M people and the most advanced transportation systems in the world. The US should be trying to copy Japan and make an effort to benefit everyone, instead of creating expensive transportation alternatives that only very few will be able to take advantage of and won't solve any real problems except for those people. (I know, US <> Boeing)
- puranjay 8y ago
  But calling Tokyo just a "city" would be somewhat misleading. It functions quite like a mini state, with each of its wards being largely self contained and independent
  - zemvpferreira 8y ago
    At the same time you'd never know that just by being in Tokyo for a while. Take public transportation: lines might change color and operator, but you use the same trains and cards to go from ward to ward, and coverage is pretty homogenous from one end to the other. That alone makes it feel like one cohesive city. Compare it to Lisbon (where I live): some five or six different systems to serve less than 2 million people. Disheveled, impossible to coordinate. Dense coverage in the city centre and sparse where people actually live, so masses of cars go into the centre every day. Gridlock and pollution everywhere. And the systems we have are considered good! I'll gladly join the chorus calling Tokyo the future. Can't come soon enough.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    But calling Tokyo just a "city" would be somewhat misleading. It functions quite like a mini state, with each of its wards being largely self contained and independent A classmate of mine who visited Amsterdam in the 80's described his experience like this: People seemed to hang out in different neighborhoods based on what "type" they appeared to be. The police might spot you being "out of place" and guide you back to where you were "supposed" to be. Essentially, they would do a friendly "deportation" of you to the right neighborhood. I think all cities have something like this going on, to one extent or another: subdivision into different sub-cities.
reaperducer 8y ago
I've sometimes thought that the best direction to go here would be flying buses, or trains, and not flying personal vehicles. Flying mid-range vehicles linking park-and-rides with city centers, or neighborhood-to-neighborhood, makes more sense to me than expanding the existing congestion upward.
- deleted 8y ago
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Tiktaalik 8y ago
Yep. Any "solution" that involves a passenger vehicle is an improvement of a critically flawed and failed paradigm and not a true sustainable solution.
choeger 8y ago
The thing is that such a "nice" city only works with a small population. For large cities you either build denser and ever denser areas or you spread out like crazy with all the negative side effects. Otoh here in Berlin we would benefit massively if we could live maybe up to 100km out of the city and travel fast and cleanly to, say, Tempelhof. Wenn have huge areas of land here where you can live a very nice life but work is in the city. Biking such distances is out of the question and roads and trains simply cannot connect all the places equally well.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  What's wrong with dense? Plenty of livable places that are dense. Better to conserve land, nature and the environment than to destroy remaining areas where wildlife can thrive.
  - choeger 8y ago
    Dense means a strained infrastructure, congestion of daily life, and -not the least- makes it neigh impossible for average Joe to own some real estate. The last point is a severe factor for gentrification IMO. Now the countryside on the other hand is, at least here, partially empty. Population shrinks and villages collapse. The elderly live in deserted ghost towns. Existing infrastructure cannot maintained. This is not wild nature out there but rather a dystopia.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      You are confusing correlation for causation. Dense doesn't mean average Joe can't own real estate; it's just that both density and high prices are both effected by a common factor (high demand). But you plan for both density and affordability.
teachrdan 8y ago
To your point: They say a rich country isn't one where the poor drive cars, but where the rich ride buses.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Who's "they"? I'm having a hard time imagining people other than the most die hard public transit proponents or government employees of countries where few can afford cars saying that. Owning your own means of transit is something the wealthy literally everywhere do (though the minimum amount of wealth to do that is higher in e.g. Singapore than in Canada), if you're super wealthy you don't even drive it yourself. I'm not criticizing public transit here (I'm a big believer in light rail) but your quote sounds like something out of left field. Edit: Turns out I was sort of close, a politician in Colombia said it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Petro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Petro
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
    > Who's "they"? Why are you asking "who?" Literally the first google result: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/879556-a-developed-country-is-not-a-place-where-the-poor https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/879556-a-developed-country-... > I'm having a hard time imagining people ... saying that And that's a problem. A failure of imagination and/or policy.
  - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
    I think the point is that in a genuinely rich country (as opposed to a country where 0.3% are rich and 99.7% are fooled into thinking they could be if they just worked harder) the state income from taxes are sufficient to properly fund public infrastructure such as buses to the point where taking the bus is something you find yourself doing equally often as driving no matter what your income is.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
      Well yes, that's exactly what teachrdan's grandparent quote says, but in a few more words.
isoskeles 8y ago
I agree with you, but it's not any uglier than a train.
whiddershins 8y ago
Elon Musk makes the assertion that it’s as simple as: buildings in cities are 3 dimensional, roads are 2 dimensional. It’s not poor urban design, it’s geometry.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  It's an oversimplified saying by Musk. Cars, buses, bicycles, trains, and pedestrians are all 3-dimensional "objects", however the issue is cars simply take up way too much public space. Having 1 person per 5 man car and having 90% of people use those 5-man cars is clearly a very sub-optimal solution. If we convert 50% of those drivers to other modes of transport, we'd see a LOT less congestion, without tunnels or flying cars or anything new.
  - joshe 8y ago
    It's easier to understand if you think about the tunnels as lanes. Each tunnel can still have busses and cars, but you can also stack them on top of each other. You can do that above ground too, but it looks super ugly and you can't really go 10 stories high. Underground you can. He probably shouldn't have driven a Tesla through it, the only message people got was that the 1% are going to have tunnels. Really you'd run autonomous buses and 4 person taxis through it. Easy to imagine it being much cheaper than public transit too.
- forkandwait 8y ago
  Elon Musk isn't an expert on urban design, so why should we care that he has a simplistic quip about a really hard problem?
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Informed people understand scale. Going from 2D to 3D is like going from O(n^2) to O(n^3). It's quite a big difference at scale. Going up in dimensionality is like going from one order of magnitude to another, only more so. (Actually, it often makes an additional two or more orders of magnitude accessible.)
- 8y ago
imagiko 8y ago
I'm surprised at the traffic levels in Dubai given the city's focus on building metro and a fairly decent public transportation system(road and water). What is missing out in this city? These guys have all the money and a free hand in implementing policy without any opposition.
- scythe 8y ago
  Dubai's growth has been and continues to be mind-bogglingly fast. San Francisco and Vancouver saw their population grew by about 20% each since 2000. Dubai grew by over 150%. Current growth rates are about 5% year-on-year. You can plan all you want, but it's hard for planning to keep up with Dubai.
megaman8 8y ago
I don't see anything wrong with Flying cars, conceptually. I would love to be able to cut my commute time by 1/3, imagine all the new job possibilities, and how many more candidates companies will have. The problem is, maybe it can never be done cost effectively enough to make viable for everyone. I mean, we can't even make simple trains cheap: here in CA, it costs almost 250$ a month to BART back and forth
- dchichkov 8y ago
  Imagine a noise of your "flying car" taking off, reaching to the houses underneath from above. Unobstructed by buildings or trees. A bullet from a less privileged neighborhood, over which a flight path is sets intercepts it. Fire starts, ballistic parachute fires and deploys, but the "flying car" collides with a light pole, in an uncontrolled landing. Your last wish is - you'd listened in 2019 and financed a tunnel instead ;)
  - megaman8 8y ago
    these are all problems that can be solved. the question is, at what cost? will tunnels be cheaper? i have no idea.
    - dchichkov 8y ago
      As far as I know, physics doesn't allow eVTOL noise to be solved. You need something different than eVTOL.
    - maxander 8y ago
      > will tunnels be cheaper? Per person? It’s hard to imagine a subway being more expensive than flying cars... even with the US’ ridiculous public works costs.
- scythe 8y ago
  The problem is that any flying object creates a massive invisible wake behind it which means that they can't be packed too closely. Birds have evolved special flight patterns to form a flock so that they don't get knocked out by each others' downdrafts. Air-propelled flying cars can never travel as close together as grounded cars, and consequently don't fix traffic much at all. If you were to invent some sort of antigravity device, this might be different, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that!
dchichkov 8y ago
Yes! Like many other baby-boomer dreams, the dream of "flying cars" in reality is an ugly noisy nightmare for the city. It's the same story of building bridges and super-highways, through the downtown because they "look good" and "let you put your name on it", without caring for the residents. For transportation we need tunnels, not bridges. And if you want something flying other the city - build a silent glider that uses only the energy of raising currents of air and gravity to accelerate for take off and decelerate to land. Or another silent vehicle. Not a stupid noisy flying car.
jonshariat 8y ago
Ugly and for the foreseeable future, LOUD.
paxys 8y ago
Copenhagen and Amsterdam have a population of 602K and 822K respectively. Los Angeles is over 4 million people, and that's just the city not the greater metropolitan area, which is 14+ million. Thinking that the model of medium-sized, developed European cities is going to work worldwide, when populations are only getting more concentrated and urban, is pretty naive.
- rafiki6 8y ago
  Funny that you raise that very valid point. Maybe we should be asking our selves why there's such a large concentration of the population on these overloaded cities, when the US has arguably enough land to distribute more effectively...Denmark overall has a larger population density as a country than the US.
  - inamberclad 8y ago
    Sure, there's wide open tracts in North Dakota if that's your thing.
- the_duke 8y ago
  London and Paris are very large cities as well. Both have excellent public transport.
  - tigershark 8y ago
    London has actually much more people than LA. 8.8M instead than less than 4M. And apart from the much better public transport, the roads are not all broken, like the ones that I’ve experienced in LA.
    - ghostly_s 8y ago
      Quite right, every other city in the world is either smaller or larger than the cities we're talking about! What a shame we can't apply any proven solutions from them.
  - 8y ago

nawitus 8y ago

Flying cars are in theory more "efficient" than public transportation, because public transportation doesn't take you directly from your home to your destination unless by accident (e.g. you happen to travel to destination which is right at a public transportation stop). Even then, that route probably doesn't take the shortest path, but rather zigzags through major locations. In addition, it's not realistic to assume every single public transporation line runs 24/7 every 3 minutes, which means you need to plan ahead instead of leaving whenever you want to. In fact, the ideal "public transportation" is a private vehicle, like this kind of a autonomous flying vehicle, which will transport you whenever and wherever you want. It's not a band-aid, it's solving the root cause. Public transportation is the band-aid, which cannot in practise solve the problem ideally.

RubenSandwich 8y ago
The ideal "public transportation" being a private vehicle completely ignores climate change issues. Even an electric private vehicle needs to charge from the grid which so far isn't very sustainable, plus each private vehicle needs its own power. The fact of the matter is shared public transportation is the most sustainable option we have.
- makerofspoons 8y ago
  This is important - the idea that the future is a private flying vehicle is an artifact of 20th century science fiction. It does not fit into 21st century ecological and economic realities.
  - nawitus 8y ago
    Agree with the current level of technology. That's why Boeing is developing new technology to solves these issues.
Quinner 8y ago
Private transports are efficient at delivering individuals to locations. Public transport has the advantage of delivering a lot of people to an approximation of their destination. The latter enables more urban density and more efficient cities overall.
- arethuza 8y ago
  "Private transports are efficient at delivering individuals to locations" Not all locations though - I wouldn't dream of driving to work in central Edinburgh as the drive would be a pain, take longer and the parking would be more expensive than getting the train.
- nawitus 8y ago
  There's nothing preventing "flying cars" of delivering a lot of people to various locations. 3D space is quite large.
dbingham 8y ago
Ideal in terms of travel time efficiency, not energy efficiency or space efficiency. Travel time is the wrong property to optimize for when we're looking at transportation and urban design. It's the mistake we've made in America for the last century. We should be optimizing for quality of life and health. Optimizing for those things yields design like Copenhagen -- bike paths, walking paths, trains and busses for longer trips. It's quiet. It's energy efficiency. It's much better for our health. It encourages healthy social interaction and the feel of community.
- AlgorithmicTime 8y ago
  Quality of life is optimized by minimizing travel time. Hence, flying cars.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Ideal in terms of travel time efficiency, not energy efficiency or space efficiency. Not even in terms of the first, because of the last; it's the optimal individual choice in terms of travel time, but making it the socially dominant option produces sprawl (because of space inefficiency); and flying doesn't actually change that (because any dense arrangement means high concentration near the endpoints, and because flight in built up areas is problematic.)
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Travel time is the wrong property to optimize for when we're looking at transportation and urban design. You'll probably eat those words. Or maybe your grandchildren or great great grandchildren will. The value of human time has been steadily going up for millennia. We used to have slaves build pyramids and pick cotton, now we use machines. We used to churn our own butter. Now there's enough wealth in the world that we can afford to have butter specialists make butter and logistics specialists get it to the store shelves. Tasks that we used to think it was reasonable to allocate human time and effort two we no wouldn't think about doing manually today. I would be highly surprised if in the future we did not continue to optimize for smaller travel times. Of course there are energy and space trade-offs. I think it's highly likely that we will chose to solve the problems caused by those trade-offs rather than having people endure longer travel times when we have the power to shorten them (with tradeoffs). Spending less and less human time on "overhead" tasks (like churning butter, washing clothes, traveling, etc.) has been a constant theme for millennia. I do not see any reason why that will change.
yason 8y ago
Ideally, I'd just walk and use no vehicles at all to be most effective. This assumes lots of services, jobs, and housing all within decent walking distances which is quite common in older (European) cities. Merely walking doesn't scale but the natural extension for longer distances is to walk to a suitable public transit stop, hop on the train/tram/subway, waiting for a while, and continue walking to your destination. This will also effectively double the locations you might be interested in visiting: you can walk around near home and you can walk around near your workplace. So, you can use the most effective mode of transport i.e. walking around hundreds of locations (shops, restaurants, services) but you can also switch the whole area by changing transit to another local centre. It's like looking up stuff really fast in the whole cache line, and then making calculated jumps to read another location into your cache and continuing to traverse locally there.
- nawitus 8y ago
  Even more ideally you can fly anywhere quickly instead of settling for either long transportation times or walking to whatever is nearby.
  - yason 8y ago
    This would be the case if businesses were scattered around like in the auto-centric USA. There's no way any transport can be more efficient than me walking a couple of blocks and checking out maybe 100 doors to different businesses to be considered on my way.
anyfoo 8y ago
That’s not how “efficient” works. Not only do you look at each person individually instead of the whole system, in which everyone having their whole transport is ridiculously inefficient in required space, energy and coordination effort alone, it’s also likely to actually be so incredibly inefficient on the whole system that the value breaks down for each individual person, even if you completely overlook the drastic side effects on the whole system, by not actually getting anybody anywhere in a timely manner. Thinking like this baffles me, I can only hope that you are very young.
- nawitus 8y ago
  If the vehicle is flying and autonomus (like what Boeing is developing), then there's plenty of space in three dimensions. Coordination should be solvable with software. Energy use is an interesting factor, of course. There are possibilities (like cheap nuclear power) to solve that.
  - anyfoo 8y ago
    Because those vehicles can move in the third dimension as easily as in the other two? Because this wouldn't require an intense amount of coordination between vehicles, and tons and tons of added security measures and protocols, given that cars can now literally fall from the sky and onto each other? Because the resources to build those magic cars are easily and sustainably acquirable? Because this does not need a much more involved inspection and maintenance infrastructure? Because energy considerations has been solved, and things "like cheap nuclear power" are safely and readily available? And the insane amounts of power required are so easy to distribute among those ubiquitous cars? I just don't see how this is "efficient".
    - nawitus 8y ago
      It's true that 2D is a lot easier than 3D. It would also require a lot of new technology. It is a solvable problem, though, and we need to solve it to some degree even today (due to airplanes). The need to solve coordination will only increase thanks to proliferation of drones, too.
nradov 8y ago
Due to noise and safety issues, none of these new VTOL aircraft are going to operate in residential neighborhoods. They certainly aren't going to land in your driveway. In some cases they might be a good option for short trips across congested urban areas, but they'll still have to operate from designated landing pads. So they won't do anything to solve the last mile transportation problem.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > In some cases they might be a good option for short trips across congested urban areas Well, if you need to get from an uncongested area to an uncongested area with a congested urban areas in between and no bypass motorway, and no accessible public transit maybe. If either origin or destination is congested adding take-off and landing traffic is just going to make things worse.

knightofmars 8y ago

And noisy unless I'm mistaken.

BurningFrog 8y ago
That's where Elon's tunnels are undeniably the better 3D alternative.
- eropple 8y ago
  Sure--insofar as eventually, once they fail, the tunnels are already the correct size for a standard subway car for actual mass transit that can actually help people. 'Cause the on-street traffic jams they would--not "might", check out donoteat01's stuff for a full breakdown--create are not exactly a better situation.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Elon's tunnels are the worst 3D alternative. The hourly capacity of a single city bus exceeds the daily capacity of an Elontunnel. For example: Elon has proposed a tunnel to Dodger stadium. However, the existing Union Station-Stadium shuttles can (and do) handle 10x the proposed Elontunnel's max daily capacity in about an hour or two depending on traffic.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Is this assuming a single car at a time in the tunnel? Otherwise I don't see how it could possibly be true. That's absurdly low volume. Like a regular road would beat it easily.
    - eropple 8y ago
      Not a single car, but a lot fewer than Elon wants you to believe. We already know that the baseline technology being proposed works. Guided buses have been in use for a long time now. But there's a reason it's used with buses, not individual cars. And it's for a pretty simple reason: the loading process into the tunnels can't be fast. Much hay is being made about minimal surface disruption, but elevators are slow. As is driving into a guide tray that moves the car along. donoteat01 does pretty fantastic video work about a number of urban planning topics and he's shot this one full of holes already. You should watch it if you're curious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs

Pica_soO 8y ago

Its also one hack away from a city filled with cruise missiles..

jandrese 8y ago

LA would probably be a lot easier to get around if it had 1/7 of the people it has now.

nwah1 8y ago
Walkability, density, and population are all distinct features of an urban setting. You could have a highly zoned, non-walkable city that is very dense. You could have a lightly populated city that is not walkable because of sprawl (see: all the countless cities defined by "stroads"). Sprawl occurs as a result of tax policy, transportation infrastructure, zoning, and other factors. One could envision a version of LA with less vacant lots, less surface-level or curbside parking, less single-story fast food franchises, etc. One could envision an LA with an efficient transportation like Hong Kong. It is completely possible to achieve livability with a high population and high density. Indeed, that generally will correlate with more cool stuff to do. Reducing population would by no means necessarily lead to walkability or livability.

ta1234567890 8y ago

Completely agree. Also, in a way the future is already here, just take a look at Tokyo, the most populated metro area in the world with 38M people and the most advanced transportation systems in the world. The US should be trying to copy Japan and make an effort to benefit everyone, instead of creating expensive transportation alternatives that only very few will be able to take advantage of and won't solve any real problems except for those people. (I know, US <> Boeing)

puranjay 8y ago
But calling Tokyo just a "city" would be somewhat misleading. It functions quite like a mini state, with each of its wards being largely self contained and independent
- zemvpferreira 8y ago
  At the same time you'd never know that just by being in Tokyo for a while. Take public transportation: lines might change color and operator, but you use the same trains and cards to go from ward to ward, and coverage is pretty homogenous from one end to the other. That alone makes it feel like one cohesive city. Compare it to Lisbon (where I live): some five or six different systems to serve less than 2 million people. Disheveled, impossible to coordinate. Dense coverage in the city centre and sparse where people actually live, so masses of cars go into the centre every day. Gridlock and pollution everywhere. And the systems we have are considered good! I'll gladly join the chorus calling Tokyo the future. Can't come soon enough.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  But calling Tokyo just a "city" would be somewhat misleading. It functions quite like a mini state, with each of its wards being largely self contained and independent A classmate of mine who visited Amsterdam in the 80's described his experience like this: People seemed to hang out in different neighborhoods based on what "type" they appeared to be. The police might spot you being "out of place" and guide you back to where you were "supposed" to be. Essentially, they would do a friendly "deportation" of you to the right neighborhood. I think all cities have something like this going on, to one extent or another: subdivision into different sub-cities.

reaperducer 8y ago

I've sometimes thought that the best direction to go here would be flying buses, or trains, and not flying personal vehicles. Flying mid-range vehicles linking park-and-rides with city centers, or neighborhood-to-neighborhood, makes more sense to me than expanding the existing congestion upward.

deleted 8y ago
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Tiktaalik 8y ago

Yep. Any "solution" that involves a passenger vehicle is an improvement of a critically flawed and failed paradigm and not a true sustainable solution.

choeger 8y ago

The thing is that such a "nice" city only works with a small population. For large cities you either build denser and ever denser areas or you spread out like crazy with all the negative side effects. Otoh here in Berlin we would benefit massively if we could live maybe up to 100km out of the city and travel fast and cleanly to, say, Tempelhof. Wenn have huge areas of land here where you can live a very nice life but work is in the city. Biking such distances is out of the question and roads and trains simply cannot connect all the places equally well.

bobthepanda 8y ago
What's wrong with dense? Plenty of livable places that are dense. Better to conserve land, nature and the environment than to destroy remaining areas where wildlife can thrive.
- choeger 8y ago
  Dense means a strained infrastructure, congestion of daily life, and -not the least- makes it neigh impossible for average Joe to own some real estate. The last point is a severe factor for gentrification IMO. Now the countryside on the other hand is, at least here, partially empty. Population shrinks and villages collapse. The elderly live in deserted ghost towns. Existing infrastructure cannot maintained. This is not wild nature out there but rather a dystopia.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    You are confusing correlation for causation. Dense doesn't mean average Joe can't own real estate; it's just that both density and high prices are both effected by a common factor (high demand). But you plan for both density and affordability.

teachrdan 8y ago

To your point: They say a rich country isn't one where the poor drive cars, but where the rich ride buses.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Who's "they"? I'm having a hard time imagining people other than the most die hard public transit proponents or government employees of countries where few can afford cars saying that. Owning your own means of transit is something the wealthy literally everywhere do (though the minimum amount of wealth to do that is higher in e.g. Singapore than in Canada), if you're super wealthy you don't even drive it yourself. I'm not criticizing public transit here (I'm a big believer in light rail) but your quote sounds like something out of left field. Edit: Turns out I was sort of close, a politician in Colombia said it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Petro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Petro
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  > Who's "they"? Why are you asking "who?" Literally the first google result: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/879556-a-developed-country-is-not-a-place-where-the-poor https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/879556-a-developed-country-... > I'm having a hard time imagining people ... saying that And that's a problem. A failure of imagination and/or policy.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  I think the point is that in a genuinely rich country (as opposed to a country where 0.3% are rich and 99.7% are fooled into thinking they could be if they just worked harder) the state income from taxes are sufficient to properly fund public infrastructure such as buses to the point where taking the bus is something you find yourself doing equally often as driving no matter what your income is.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
    Well yes, that's exactly what teachrdan's grandparent quote says, but in a few more words.

isoskeles 8y ago

I agree with you, but it's not any uglier than a train.

whiddershins 8y ago

Elon Musk makes the assertion that it’s as simple as: buildings in cities are 3 dimensional, roads are 2 dimensional. It’s not poor urban design, it’s geometry.

WhompingWindows 8y ago
It's an oversimplified saying by Musk. Cars, buses, bicycles, trains, and pedestrians are all 3-dimensional "objects", however the issue is cars simply take up way too much public space. Having 1 person per 5 man car and having 90% of people use those 5-man cars is clearly a very sub-optimal solution. If we convert 50% of those drivers to other modes of transport, we'd see a LOT less congestion, without tunnels or flying cars or anything new.
- joshe 8y ago
  It's easier to understand if you think about the tunnels as lanes. Each tunnel can still have busses and cars, but you can also stack them on top of each other. You can do that above ground too, but it looks super ugly and you can't really go 10 stories high. Underground you can. He probably shouldn't have driven a Tesla through it, the only message people got was that the 1% are going to have tunnels. Really you'd run autonomous buses and 4 person taxis through it. Easy to imagine it being much cheaper than public transit too.
forkandwait 8y ago
Elon Musk isn't an expert on urban design, so why should we care that he has a simplistic quip about a really hard problem?
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Informed people understand scale. Going from 2D to 3D is like going from O(n^2) to O(n^3). It's quite a big difference at scale. Going up in dimensionality is like going from one order of magnitude to another, only more so. (Actually, it often makes an additional two or more orders of magnitude accessible.)
8y ago

imagiko 8y ago

I'm surprised at the traffic levels in Dubai given the city's focus on building metro and a fairly decent public transportation system(road and water). What is missing out in this city? These guys have all the money and a free hand in implementing policy without any opposition.

scythe 8y ago
Dubai's growth has been and continues to be mind-bogglingly fast. San Francisco and Vancouver saw their population grew by about 20% each since 2000. Dubai grew by over 150%. Current growth rates are about 5% year-on-year. You can plan all you want, but it's hard for planning to keep up with Dubai.

megaman8 8y ago

I don't see anything wrong with Flying cars, conceptually. I would love to be able to cut my commute time by 1/3, imagine all the new job possibilities, and how many more candidates companies will have. The problem is, maybe it can never be done cost effectively enough to make viable for everyone. I mean, we can't even make simple trains cheap: here in CA, it costs almost 250$ a month to BART back and forth

dchichkov 8y ago
Imagine a noise of your "flying car" taking off, reaching to the houses underneath from above. Unobstructed by buildings or trees. A bullet from a less privileged neighborhood, over which a flight path is sets intercepts it. Fire starts, ballistic parachute fires and deploys, but the "flying car" collides with a light pole, in an uncontrolled landing. Your last wish is - you'd listened in 2019 and financed a tunnel instead ;)
- megaman8 8y ago
  these are all problems that can be solved. the question is, at what cost? will tunnels be cheaper? i have no idea.
  - dchichkov 8y ago
    As far as I know, physics doesn't allow eVTOL noise to be solved. You need something different than eVTOL.
  - maxander 8y ago
    > will tunnels be cheaper? Per person? It’s hard to imagine a subway being more expensive than flying cars... even with the US’ ridiculous public works costs.
scythe 8y ago
The problem is that any flying object creates a massive invisible wake behind it which means that they can't be packed too closely. Birds have evolved special flight patterns to form a flock so that they don't get knocked out by each others' downdrafts. Air-propelled flying cars can never travel as close together as grounded cars, and consequently don't fix traffic much at all. If you were to invent some sort of antigravity device, this might be different, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that!

dchichkov 8y ago

Yes! Like many other baby-boomer dreams, the dream of "flying cars" in reality is an ugly noisy nightmare for the city. It's the same story of building bridges and super-highways, through the downtown because they "look good" and "let you put your name on it", without caring for the residents. For transportation we need tunnels, not bridges. And if you want something flying other the city - build a silent glider that uses only the energy of raising currents of air and gravity to accelerate for take off and decelerate to land. Or another silent vehicle. Not a stupid noisy flying car.

jonshariat 8y ago

Ugly and for the foreseeable future, LOUD.

paxys 8y ago

Copenhagen and Amsterdam have a population of 602K and 822K respectively. Los Angeles is over 4 million people, and that's just the city not the greater metropolitan area, which is 14+ million. Thinking that the model of medium-sized, developed European cities is going to work worldwide, when populations are only getting more concentrated and urban, is pretty naive.

rafiki6 8y ago
Funny that you raise that very valid point. Maybe we should be asking our selves why there's such a large concentration of the population on these overloaded cities, when the US has arguably enough land to distribute more effectively...Denmark overall has a larger population density as a country than the US.
- inamberclad 8y ago
  Sure, there's wide open tracts in North Dakota if that's your thing.
the_duke 8y ago
London and Paris are very large cities as well. Both have excellent public transport.
- tigershark 8y ago
  London has actually much more people than LA. 8.8M instead than less than 4M. And apart from the much better public transport, the roads are not all broken, like the ones that I’ve experienced in LA.
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    Quite right, every other city in the world is either smaller or larger than the cities we're talking about! What a shame we can't apply any proven solutions from them.
- 8y ago