memes

Many cities paved over their tram lines. Sometimes they poke through during road work. We had trams in nearly every city 100 years ago yet today people tell me we can't afford it or our population is too small to support it. If we could do it 100 years ago we could certainly do it now.

Bus lanes are too easy for the next politician to remove bus priority and allow cars back into the lane. At least with rails it's a lot more costly to remove the route. Busses also still contribute to microplastics and tire waste compared to railed trams. Trams are also easier to automate which can make employing drivers and adding trams to lines less difficult compared to buses. The rails are also more effecient as there is less friction.

I'd defintely take BRT over no transit but many cities are dense enough to justify electrified trams.

Just lay rails in the lane. Turn it into, I dunno, a fuck you I'm a train lane

Trains are extremely convenient. You optimize them for convenience by adding more trains.

Everyone thinks the sky is big, without considering just how unscalable flying cars are

• no building is designed for large scale entry/exit at roof top. Most don’t support any
• the low altitude airspace over a densely populated area is very limited. Given current separation, minimum altitude, speed limitations, a city can support only a small number of flying cars. And no, “smart” vehicles don’t change the laws of physics, even if they help us get closer to them
• a flying car will always be more expensive than a not flying car, which will always be more expensive than transit

Let’s stop worrying about new ways for the ultra-rich to avoid the frustrations the rest of us have to deal with, we’ll all be better off if they also have an incentive to design more effective cities and transportation for everyone

Within cities?

Look, aircraft are Hella noisy and if stuff goes bad, they'll smash into buildings. Using them for intra-urban transit is not safe. Besides, I don't know if multicopters can autorotate^[1]^, which only adds to the safety concerns.

So why not bring it slightly closer to the ground. Maybe put the transportation device on a bridge or viaduct. And while you could put some stairs up from the streets, you may even choose to link buildings into them directly. Most tall buildings have lifts, after all.

Next, giving each building its own link into the system would be excessive. You can achieve 90 percent of the utility if you have larger entry hubs for multiple buildings, and expect people to walk the last mile.

Anyway, back to the vehicle, since a vehicle for a handful of people is rather inefficient, why not build the vehicles for many dozens of people? Why not build it to connect multiple vehicles? If you run, like, four of these, every five minutes, most people will be able to walk up any time and just go.

And to make that movement more efficient, let's have our vehicles roll along a specifically designed path, optimised for minimal friction by using hard wheels on a hard surface.

There, I replaced the quadcopters with a train.

EDIT:
^[1]^: According to one answered question on a StackExchange page, the answer to this question is probably no. Autorotation requires some magnitude of control of the pitch of your rotors, something that most multicopters do not have.

It does make me intrigued to see what'd happen if you could or did fit a multicopter with swashplates and pitch-adjustable rotors.