On Monday, transportation startup Joby Aviation conducted a demo flight of its six-prop electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in New York City. The exhibition was...
New York intends to have electric air taxis by 2025::undefined
NYC has mass transit. Better than most American cities anyway.
This article or whatever is likely just an internet fever dream that will never amount to anything. However it is interesting to imagine a large scale transit system that is entirely point-to-point for everyone. No stations you need to migrate to in order to experience mass transit. No areas it doesn’t go to. No crowded train cars. Mass transit does come with a lot of compromises.
Flying taxis sound dumb to me in practice but in theory it’s the ideal form of mass transit, at least from the perspective of riders’ time and convenience. Maybe someday we’ll have the technology to enable something like this. It won’t be lithium ion powered propeller drones in 2025, though.
Imagine all the problems with cars today.
They’re noisy, use a lot of energy, waste a lot of space, and are prone to fatal accidents.
Now make the car fly. You have just made all of those problems exponentially worse.
I for one would be furious if there were mini-helicopters constantly swooping by my bedroom window in the middle of the night.
I just said that flying taxis are not the solution. I don’t know what the solution is but it will only come when technology addresses those energy, noise, and safety concerns. It’s not hard to imagine them all being addressed though. Energy storage keeps improving. Fusion energy is bound to be 30 years away for only another century or two. And the noise from early cars is 99.5% gone after so many years of evolution. I firmly believe that the safety issue is human drivers, not cars, and we have solutions coming for all that too.
You know what I hate worse than cars, though? Roads. We’ve conceded so much space to roads. The ground should be for people, bikes, animals, and ecosystems. You say that putting traffic in the air makes it noisier but I’m not so sure… it would be more removed than it is when it’s all right here on the ground whooshing past our houses. I think the future is likely underground or in the sky. And hopefully the need for transit can be reduced a lot too. That’s also easier to imagine in the telework age we’re living in.
I guess a better word is abstract. A massively point to point transit system would be ideal for riders and this would bring more time to their lives and productivity to their jobs. Anyone who thinks the commuter train is the pinnacle terminus of transportation visions doesn’t ride one daily.
The same could be said about the internet. Surely, a direct connection between every point would make the internet ultimately fast, better experience, etc etc, but this rapidly becomes a huge problem the bigger the system gets.
In fact, we already have a massive point to point transit system, and it totally sucks ie cars. As soon as you start to take a look at the bigger picture and consider all the variables, you start to see the utopia just isn’t. Congestion, pollution, upkeep, management, infrastructure, it’s all exponentiated by the point to point system.
The system most countries with decent public transport have is the hub/spoke model, where massive transports (trains, planes, buses) travel between hubs, and smaller feeder services (buses, light rail, taxis) transport people from the hub to the destination. No system is perfect, but this is as close to it as you can get.
I used to take the train every day, my experience was fine, I would argue that bad experiences aren’t due to trains but due to poor investment and management.
> I would argue that bad experiences aren’t due to trains but due to poor investment and management.
I agree. I used trains to get to school as a commuter.
Nothing makes a train more unusable than not knowing when it will arrive at the destination (it was sometimes hours late) or if it will show up at all (the schedule was constantly changing, and some trains would just be cancelled when equipment was broken).
NYC has mass transit. Better than most American cities anyway.
This article or whatever is likely just an internet fever dream that will never amount to anything. However it is interesting to imagine a large scale transit system that is entirely point-to-point for everyone. No stations you need to migrate to in order to experience mass transit. No areas it doesn’t go to. No crowded train cars. Mass transit does come with a lot of compromises.
Flying taxis sound dumb to me in practice but in theory it’s the ideal form of mass transit, at least from the perspective of riders’ time and convenience. Maybe someday we’ll have the technology to enable something like this. It won’t be lithium ion powered propeller drones in 2025, though.
Imagine all the problems with cars today.
They’re noisy, use a lot of energy, waste a lot of space, and are prone to fatal accidents.
Now make the car fly. You have just made all of those problems exponentially worse.
I for one would be furious if there were mini-helicopters constantly swooping by my bedroom window in the middle of the night.
I just said that flying taxis are not the solution. I don’t know what the solution is but it will only come when technology addresses those energy, noise, and safety concerns. It’s not hard to imagine them all being addressed though. Energy storage keeps improving. Fusion energy is bound to be 30 years away for only another century or two. And the noise from early cars is 99.5% gone after so many years of evolution. I firmly believe that the safety issue is human drivers, not cars, and we have solutions coming for all that too.
You know what I hate worse than cars, though? Roads. We’ve conceded so much space to roads. The ground should be for people, bikes, animals, and ecosystems. You say that putting traffic in the air makes it noisier but I’m not so sure… it would be more removed than it is when it’s all right here on the ground whooshing past our houses. I think the future is likely underground or in the sky. And hopefully the need for transit can be reduced a lot too. That’s also easier to imagine in the telework age we’re living in.
yes but in theory
I guess a better word is abstract. A massively point to point transit system would be ideal for riders and this would bring more time to their lives and productivity to their jobs. Anyone who thinks the commuter train is the pinnacle terminus of transportation visions doesn’t ride one daily.
The same could be said about the internet. Surely, a direct connection between every point would make the internet ultimately fast, better experience, etc etc, but this rapidly becomes a huge problem the bigger the system gets.
In fact, we already have a massive point to point transit system, and it totally sucks ie cars. As soon as you start to take a look at the bigger picture and consider all the variables, you start to see the utopia just isn’t. Congestion, pollution, upkeep, management, infrastructure, it’s all exponentiated by the point to point system.
The system most countries with decent public transport have is the hub/spoke model, where massive transports (trains, planes, buses) travel between hubs, and smaller feeder services (buses, light rail, taxis) transport people from the hub to the destination. No system is perfect, but this is as close to it as you can get.
I used to take the train every day, my experience was fine, I would argue that bad experiences aren’t due to trains but due to poor investment and management.
> I would argue that bad experiences aren’t due to trains but due to poor investment and management.
I agree. I used trains to get to school as a commuter.
Nothing makes a train more unusable than not knowing when it will arrive at the destination (it was sometimes hours late) or if it will show up at all (the schedule was constantly changing, and some trains would just be cancelled when equipment was broken).
@luthis @scarabic