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.
Oh I mean you can replace them, but when nothing of the original system remains you’re not so much optimizing the idea as throwing it out to use trains instead
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
I wasn’t, to be clear, advocating for them, just pointing out that they were one of those things tech bros keep suggesting over and over again. I don’t suspect they’re something to really worry about, because I don’t really expect the economics of them to work out.
What about those giant quadcopter type things they keep wanting to build to fly from building rooftops in cities for some reason?
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.
If they really want rooftop travel, a gondola system could probably work.
Works assuming the rooftops are roughly in line of sight. That is something I assumed not to be definitively true in the other comment…
Oh I mean you can replace them, but when nothing of the original system remains you’re not so much optimizing the idea as throwing it out to use trains instead
Everyone thinks the sky is big, without considering just how unscalable flying cars are
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
I wasn’t, to be clear, advocating for them, just pointing out that they were one of those things tech bros keep suggesting over and over again. I don’t suspect they’re something to really worry about, because I don’t really expect the economics of them to work out.
I wouldn’t expect the economics of private jets to work out either, and yet…