Alef Aeronautics’ ‘Model A’ has a driving range of 200 miles and a flight range of 110 miles. The company plans to start delivering cars by late 2025.
It isn’t even that dramatic.
Statistically close to all trips are within a couple of miles of home. US average vehicle miles traveled per person per day are a staggeringly high 25, yet still, nearly all trips people make are very close to home. Good pedestrian and bike infrastructure is enough to cover virtually all of those trips. You don’t need roads for cars. You don’t really need trains. You don’t need personal aircraft for sure. You don’t need autotaxies or any other weird techbro drone solution. You just need maintained, pleasant bikeped routes where you won’t feel like at any moment you may get mowed down by a F250 SuperDuty. But we deliberately design spaces to be unpleasant and unsafe for anyone outside of a car to stop people from walking even though designs like that are WAY more expensive for the taxpayer.
High-speed rail and intercity mass transit are super neat and I’d love to see more of it. And that’s definitely the kind of trip a “flying car” is primarily confronting. But it’s not even the real problem that needs fixing. Trips to a park, grocery store, and bar are the trips that need fixing, and the fact that we encourage and sometimes even force designs where you NEED cars to make those trips is madness.
and bar are the trips that need fixing (…) and the fact that we encourage and sometimes even force designs where you NEED cars to make those trips is madness.
It’s utterly baffling to me that bar culture is so alive in America where we have to drive everywhere. It seems like a fucking obvious problem that everyone just ignores. Under what circumstances is a person driving themselves to a bar, parking there for a while, then leaving unimpaired? People should be protesting this in the streets; why does no one seem to care?
It’s worse than that. I would venture that in nearly all US places where a new bar can be built there is a required mandatory minimum number of parking spaces to build next to it to ensure it’s “easy” to drive to. Which doesn’t even work, but that’s a separate screed.
Most civil engineers and urban planners don’t even think about it because that’s not the job as they see it. The professions surrounding urban planning and development largely just consider the codes and manuals to be received wisdom and so carry out their teachings uncritically.
You just need maintained, pleasant bikeped routes
Weather, though. Not every place is California.
Other countries mange this with proper clothing and a variety of alternative public transit options.
Rain Capes are a popular solution for rainy weather when cycling.
Or you chose to avoid the bike that day and take the bus/streetcar/metro/etc.
I live in NYC and by far my favorite aspect is being able to decide between a variety for transit options that best suit the specific trip I’m making. For example, I typically commute by bike, but if it’s raining I can easily switch that trip to be on the subway.
First, the US would need to have more locomotive manufacturers than you can fit in a single sprinter van. We’ve abandoned rail so thoroughly that we have to have foreign companies manufacture most of our rolling stock these days.
We’ve abandoned passenger rail, but not freight rail. The USA consistently ranks as one of the top users of freight rail (and by many metrics it is the top user of freight rail). The issue is that most American cities outside of the northeast corridor tend to be far enough apart that you are going to be better off flying. High speed rail hasn’t really caught on yet, but I suspect in another 15 years it’s going to be lot more common now that it’s starting to look commercially viable
Just in case you’re not aware, armored trains are (or were) a thing. In the US they were used from the US civil war to early in the cold war (at the end there to transport nuclear weapons).
In the rest of the world… the most recent use is by Russia in their invasion of Ukraine.
The US has loads of trains. This is a huge misnomer. The US has one of the most complex commercial-industrial train networks in the world. The problem is the commuter one uses the same tracks and is massively underfunded.
America has one of the worst run freight rail networks in the world. Plighted by decades of deferred maintenance and destruction of existing infrastructure in service of the all mighty operating ratio.
Amtrak would be far more reliable without the American freight rail industry clogging up the lines with massive super trains and refusal to make capital improvements to the network.
