It’s fair to say that Elon Musk is a little obsessed with transportation. He’s no ordinary train-spotter, though. No, he’s on a mission to radically change how every person on the plant gets around. And we’re not just talking about electric cars. The man wants to change the way cities organise themselves by introducing new forms of transportation that undermine the current car/suburbia setup.
While most countries have some kind of public transportation network in place – even the US – the current model is old. Most of our transportation tech is right out of the 19th century and hasn’t changed all that much over the decades since – at least not fundamentally. We still get the train. It still runs on rails. And buses are just big moving vans designed to hold lots of people – nothing particularly innovative or exciting there.
But what Musk’s got coming down the pike is new. And it’s not just one project either: there are at least three radically different transportation methods he’s got in store for the planet, depending on the type of journey you want to make.
Rockets From London To Sydney In Two Hours
Can you imagine blasting off in a rocket from London at 9 am GMT and arriving at Sydney at 11 GMT, just two hours later? Sounds like science fiction, but as Musk has pointed out, the world has the technology to do it. As part of SpaceX’s BFR (Big “Falcon” Rocket) project, the company wants to make money using the passenger pod to transport wealthy business travellers and impatient holidaymakers to far-flung corners of the globe in record time. London to New York, he says, will take about half an hour, or be eight times faster than Concorde on a good run.
There’s just one slight problem: will people want to strap themselves to an ICBM? There’ll be no talking to a lawyer after an accident in one of these babies. A problem in the upper-atmospheres travelling at Mach 10, and nobody survives.
Tubes Underground For Cars In Chicago
Musk’s ambition isn’t limited to revolutionising the way that we travel between countries. He wants to get rid of the biggest transportation problems in most people’s lives: getting around the city. Los Angeles, for instance, is a city that’s built around the automobile. But even here, with its eight-lane highways, drivers can find themselves stuck in traffic for hours. As Musk points out, the problem is that the city itself is three-dimensions (thanks to all those office towers in the middle), but the transportation network is two-dimensional. Of course, you’re going to have problems.
His solution is to make transportation three-dimensional too, but rather than build layers of monorails above ground; he sees the solution as being the constriction of lots of tunnels for cars below street level. Cars will park on lifts by the side of the street and then descend below ground on a skate which will then propel them to their destination at the other end of the tunnel. It’s a radical idea but could pay dividends in the future if it can solve the traffic problem.
