Disrupting Traffic Jams
Peter H. Diamandis
Data-driven optimist inspiring entrepreneurs through research, investment & community to create an abundant future for humanity | M.D. | Futurist | Speaker | Podcast Host | 4x NY Times Best-Selling Author
At the TED conference last Friday, Elon Musk said, “Traffic is one of the most soul-destroying things.”
If you hate traffic jams too, this blog may give you hope.
Some people think autonomous cars will solve congestion, but in reality, if electric autonomous cars drop the cost of transport 5x – 10x, car usage could increase dramatically and traffic could potentially increase.
So what are we going to do?
Just last week...
Three major developments in transportation were announced last week.
They represent two different strategies to solving the traffic problem: taking to the air and tunneling underground.
Here’s what happened this week:
1. Kitty Hawk: The stealth company Kitty Hawk (backed by Alphabet CEO, Larry Page) announced its first product -- the Kitty Hawk Flyer – and released its first video of a prototype vehicle. (I just put down a $100 deposit on the website to reserve mine.)
While at TED, I had lunch with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Kitty Hawk. Sebastian is brilliant, the previous head of Google’s autonomous car efforts and professor of AI at Stanford. It's clear that the Kitty Hawk Flyer is just a small peek at what’s to come.
It's also clear that in the long run, autonomous VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) transporters may actually be easier and safer than autonomous transport on the ground.
For those of you interested in your own KH Flyer, check out this video:
2. Uber Elevate: While I was at TED, my friend Jeff Holden, the Chief Product Officer of Uber, was announcing Uber’s plans to deploy a network of flying cars in Dallas, Texas and Dubai, UAE by 2020.
This is part of Uber’s on-demand urban air transportation initiative called Uber Elevate.
Holden hosted a three-day summit this week to build awareness about Elevate’s mission and define a path towards initial urban eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) operations.
Check out a quick Uber Elevate video here:
3. The Boring Company – Digging Underground: Also this week, Elon Musk's 'Boring Company' revealed its massive tunneling equipment and plans to dig tunnels under Los Angeles.
For context, a few months ago, Musk announced his interest in digging underground tunnels for cars to reduce traffic, launching a company called The Boring Company.
His vision (for the fellow Angelenos out there) involves being able to travel from "Westwood to LAX in 6 min"… which could otherwise take an hour during rush hour.
Current state-of-the-art tunneling technology is very slow and expensive (for reference, subway extension projects today cost about $1 billion per mile, and a snail can travel 14x faster than current tunneling tech).
The Boring Company aims to create a 10x improvement in the price of tunneling.
Like the air, there is a lot of space underground. You can build an arbitrary number of levels of tunnels based on need.
And while air-based approaches raise complaints ranging from noise to distraction, if you dig deep enough underground (around 4 tunnel diameters), people on the surface can’t even detect tunneling activity.
As tunneling continues to drop in price, you can expect Hyperloop One technology to be deployed in these tunnels as well.
Take a look at this video for a better idea of how this would work:
The Future IS Inspiring
As Musk also mentioned at TED, "It's important to have a future that is inspiring "
I couldn’t agree more.
We live in the most exciting time to be alive in human history. There are no problems we can’t solve... including L.A. traffic jams.
Keep your mind open to the possibilities and help me create a world of Abundance!
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Founder
7 年thats a photoshop deal right? the shadow is way too large for that vehicle to be making and the angle of the sun seems off to throw that large a shadow, but cool idea, how does the FAA pass laws regarding vehicle traffic?, how do those laws get changed?, do you have speed limits? right of way? air traffic controllers, or is this just another "Private helicopter for the wealthy? that doesn't solve ANY problems with traffic for the common man…. and DMV?? forget about that group doing anything in a timely fashion!, lol, I love future projections, we where all supposed to be paperless and driving our own hovercrafts according to Popular Mechanics 1999!…don't in vet your money just yet kids, this would go to the military before the public.
Strategic Sales Consultant | RWD/E | Clinical Trials
7 年ok i love the idea, but i am the "lucille ball" of operators for new devices (always pushing the envelope, learning from inevitable mistakes)...and one of the many reasons for fail-safe engineering (thank goodness). so I will be in the wings (pun) awaiting the infrastructure and applauding the rest of you from afar!
RESEARCHER in EDUCATION and NATURAL SCIENCES at UNIT of RESEARCH MANSITA LIDAM
7 年This as been my dream for years. To have a flying machine smaller then helicopter to move all over forgetting about annoying traffic and mostly move straight line to gain time. I hope Your company is taking us there soon.
Sales Consultant at CCW Consulting, LLC
7 年No doubt it's coming but needs serious infrastructure to support efficiency and safety
Principal Scientist Chemistry Drug Development - R&D Database and Electronic LabNotebook Administrator
7 年Nice dreams. Reminds me of my youth, when I was sure that in years 2000s I would have been zipping through the Solar System in a spaceship. Like any brilliant idea, these proposal are worthless without a clear way of putting them into practice. And building the flying machines, digging the tunnels or making the sliders is not the real problem. We have been making that for more than a century. The real issue is having the whole thing work at a metropolitan scale, without ignoring the human (average human...) factor for marketing reasons. Way to often humankind was blinded by the brightness of its own ideas, just for the next generation to realize that it is not all gold that glitters. Realistically, the only good thing that in my opinion will come out from the money invested in project like those is the development of new technologies and human environment/behavior models. The real solution to traffic jams? 1) education 2) public transport (which, working as a clockwork and limiting human factgor, makes up a little for the consequences of lack of education).