On a Wing and a Fare

Ever since film was born, from the earliest days of television and most certainly into the 21st century, we have been obsessed with flying cars. The above image is from the Hanna-Barbera animated television series, The Jetsons. It was wildly successful, running from 1962 to 1987. Today’s tech headlines are about space travel, our recent successful Mars landing, how Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – tech mega-billionaires – have turned their attention to commercial ventures in space. Bezos has also begun exploring drone deliveries of products ordered on Amazon. And there are massive advances in the development of driverless vehicles. See my December 4th, Cars, Trucks, the Future, Driverless and the Occasional Now blog for some details.

Ever since film was born, from the earliest days of television and most certainly into the 21st century, we have been obsessed with flying cars. The above image is from the Hanna-Barbera animated television series, The Jetsons. It was wildly successful, running from 1962 to 1987. Today’s tech headlines are about space travel, our recent successful Mars landing, how Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – tech mega-billionaires – have turned their attention to commercial ventures in space. Bezos has also begun exploring drone deliveries of products ordered on Amazon. And there are massive advances in the development of driverless vehicles. See my December 4th, Cars, Trucks, the Future, Driverless and the Occasional Now blog for some details.

But there are some harsh realities that just might be pushing us up in the air and off our streets and highways. The United States is at least $2 trillion dollars away from infrastructure “adequate,” much less truly efficient, in dealing with our antiquated, worn-out and insufficient systems… from our old-world power grid (hello Texas!), failing bridges, levees and dams and roads and highways that have spent their useful lives, succumbed to the elements or just plain have not expanded to meet modern demand. While infrastructure upgrades and expansion are literally investments with an absolute productivity rate of return – not mere “expenditures” without upside – there is a strong force against any non-military government allocation, regardless of the purpose. That is GOP gospel.

Still, technology has given us new safety mechanisms, which are never perfect but which may make up for the frailty of human drivers and the distractions of the “road.” No matter how much Congress may push, assuming that infrastructure is one rare bipartisan priority intersect, our years and years of governmental austerity, plus the withdrawal of massive research funds and infrastructure investment, have pushed solutions increasingly into the hands of well-heeled private sector entrepreneurs. And as we are witnessing, even bipartisan plans to upgrade and repair our infrastructure fall abysmally short of what is realistically required to become competitive again. The can we kicked down the road is itself highly damaged.

Since highways are usually not within the aegis and control of the private sector, with a few exceptions, rather than focus on the actual infrastructure that is uniquely within a governmental purview, these billionaires (individuals and corporations) have instead focused on the vehicles themselves. And most importantly, how to liberate those vehicles from a dependence on our degraded systems of streets and highways. Accommodations within our legal system to allow a new fleet of airborne local individual transports may engender some controversy, but they are much less expensive than paying for much larger infrastructure costs. Even better, they just may relieve some of the congestion and much of the wear and tear on our existing ground-based transportation system, perhaps reducing some of our obvious current infrastructure requirements. They will require new laws, regulatory requirements and some form of infrastructure support and accommodation (a lot less than rebuilding streets and highways, however).

Tech consultant and futurist, Devin Liddell, writing for the February 24th FastCompan.com, addresses one evolving niche – air taxies – that appears to be close to becoming a near term reality: “Based on our design explorations, we believe that the first flying taxis entering service in the next three to five years will feature some surprising moments for first-time passengers. The first of these aerial vehicles will operate on short, intracity routes with about 10 minutes of flight time, taking passengers between one place and another via the shortest possible route.

“This new form of mobility will be very different from what we’ve grown accustomed to with airliners, which is our existing reference point. In their early iterations, these vehicles will operate more like helicopters and look like supersized drones, but there will be key differences, including unique preflight requirements, gestural interactions with machines, and opportunities to choose how we get between A and B based on our personal values.”

There are simple efforts that need to be considered, says Liddell, for such air taxies: 1. Light aircraft require knowing the weight of passengers and their cargo. It needs to be automatic and seamless. 2. We need to integrate headphones and smart mobile phones into how passengers routinely communicate with these air vehicles. 3. We will be moving from hub-centric mass travel into a world of micromobility. From being picked up from an airport to intercity travel, decarbonization efficiencies should impact the design of both the vehicles and their operating systems. This variety of gathering passengers will require various alternative interface requirements: multimodality. 4. We may be able to be delivered directly to departing aircraft and picked up accordingly. Screenings may take place within the vehicle. And empty cabs can easily be matched with available fares nearby, eliminating waste. 5. Most of the taxi’s functionality will be automated; it is unlikely that there will be a human pilot. So passengers are going to have to know how to input directions and monitor the flight. May be tougher for older folks, those most likely to benefit from an increase in mobility, to learn… but artificial intelligence can make it a whole lot easier.

Cleanliness is a factor as well, and air cabs may have some automated disinfecting and cleaning abilities as well. The focus is going to have to deliver consumer confidence, which comes from excessive safety protocols. But that division of potential solutions to our infrastructure decay – what the private sector can or cannot do – is going to drive our future. The private emphasis on the vehicles themselves seems unstoppable. On the ground. In the air. It is no longer a maybe. It is a when and how.

I’m Peter Dekom, and society is just at the beginning of technological restructuring motivated by practical necessity, and we are all going to have to get used to the massive changes.