I spent a LOT of time working on my Main Inquiry Question and my Sub Questions. My Main Inquiry Question is “What are the types of future transportation being explored and what impacts will they have on SOCIETY?”
First of all, there are many different types of future transportation in the world, but I’m only going to talk about three. One type is called the Hyperloop. Going up to 760 miles per hour, the Hyperloop is proposed mode of passenger and freight transportation that will propel a pod-like vehicle through a reduced-pressure tube that would exceed airliner speed. The pods would accelerate to cruising speed gradually using a linear electric motor and glide above their track using passive magnetic levitation or air bearings. The tubes could also go above ground on columns or underground, eliminating the dangers of grade crossings.
The Hyperloop will cost a lot. More than you can imagine. A million. Whoops! I MEANT SEVERAL BILLION dollars due to construction, development and operation costs. This hypothetical high-speed mode of transportation would have the following characteristics: immunity to weather, collision free, twice the speed of a plane, low power consumption, and energy storage for 24-hour operation.
Musk’s vision also sees the Hyperloop as a 400-mile long network of above-ground tubes with very low air pressure inside them, which allows bus-sized capsules to travel through those tubes at near supersonic speeds.
Another type of transportation are self-driving cars. The speed limit for this is around 90 mph, but it can be pushed higher. People will no longer have to spend thousands of dollars on a new car. Instead, when they need to get somewhere, they’ll simply call for a driverless taxi.
Self-driving cars could completely change the way Americans think about where they live. Traveling from suburb to city center will become much less tiring. People will no longer have to do the driving themselves. Because of that, people will feel less need to live where they work. They’ll no longer be forced to pay the high rents and taxes common in big cities.
But a con with driverless cars are that they’re guided by computers. Those computers rely on information about roads that’s loaded into them. If something on the road changes, they are lost. For instance, they wouldn’t obey a new stop sign. They also have problems figuring out when objects such as bits of paper garbage are harmless. For that reason, they can change course suddenly for no reason. Such sudden shifts can make crashes more likely.
Another con is that since they’re guided by computers, a big con is cyber security. Terrorists can hack into them and make them do not what they’re supposed to.
But some pros are that future cars will be less damaging to the environment. Part of the reason is that they will be powered by electricity, which generates less carbon and pollution than gasoline, and can be produced by nuclear, solar or other environmentally-friendly fuel sources. It would be more accessible to more people. People will have more mobility. And now, the people who don’t have access to that — the children, the elderly, and the disabled will be able to travel. Future cars will be less damaging to the environment. Part of the reason is that they will be powered by electricity, which generates less carbon and pollution than gasoline, and can be produced by nuclear, solar or other environmentally-friendly fuel sources. The cars will be lighter. And they will choose the shortest routes to get to where we want to go. And instead of gas they will use electricity which is more efficient than gas. The energy will come not from burning hydrocarbons but from a cleaner source (electricity).
Another pro is that disabled people, who have to rely on public transportation or assistance from others to get around, could reap the benefit of self-driving cars with new freedom and enhanced mobility, as suggested by the New York Times.
Another type of future transportation are tunnels. Tunnels are a way of getting somewhere, but underground. To solve the soul-destroying traffic, roads have to go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won’t fall on your head.
A large network of road tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels). The keys to making this work is increasing tunneling speed and dropping costs by a factor of ten or more.
They’re fast to dig, and low cost tunnels would also make Hyperloop adoption viable and enable rapid transit across densely populated regions, enabling travel from New York to Washington DC in less than thirty minutes.
Why tunnels? To alleviate traffic, transportation corridors, like the buildings that feed into them, must expand into three dimensions. One option is to go up with flying cars. However flying cars have issues with weather, noise, and generally increase anxiety levels of the people below them.
The other option is to go down and build tunnels. The benefits are:
- There is no practical limit to how many layers of tunnels can be built, so any level of traffic can be addressed.
- Tunnels are weatherproof.
- Tunnel construction and operation are silent to anyone on the surface.
- Tunnels don’t divide communities with barriers and lines.
The reason nobody has done this before is that currently, tunnels are really expensive to dig, with some projects costing as much as one billion dollars per mile.
A lot of car companies, for instance, Tesla, like to make their cars green. Not the color, as you know, but it means it’s good for the ecosystem. There will be less pollution and global warming.
Overall, there are three different types of common future transportation. The Hyperloop, which can go up to 760 miles per hour, self-driving cars, the speed limit on the street being 90 miles per hour but can pushed higher, and finally Tunnels, which is a way to enable people to drive somewhere other than the road.