How do you balance human transportation needs, economic realities, and technological possibilities in assessing the future of transportation?
There is a certainly a human desire to travel and to experience speed, motion, and freedom of movement. Human transportation demand and economic development are very strongly coupled because humans spend a constant average of their income on transportation. If you don’t own an automobile, it is about 2-to-5 percent of your disposable income; in the industrialized world, it is 10 to 15 percent. Technology can certainly be developed to serve the human need to travel. We can imagine a world in which people are traveling in high-speed underground transportation systems that operate in near vacuum, insulated tunnels with very low air pressure. Studies decades ago suggested this system could connect New York and Los Angeles with a trip time of half an hour. You could imagine a world in which every human is a global citizen who could travel from one side of the earth to the other one within one and a half hours. That is, of course, a very long term vision, but technologically possible. Now, t
